An Advantage of Newness: Vicarious Learning Despite Limited Absorptive Capacity
研究发现，新进入企业尽管缺乏吸收能力，但通过内部经验学习过程能更有效地从外部知识中学习，其替代性学习效果是现有企业的两倍，从而享有“新进入者优势”。
Entrants are often viewed as suffering from a “liability of newness”—at founding, they rarely possess the knowledge and capabilities necessary to compete and survive. They can overcome this liability by learning vicariously from the knowledge of incumbent firms. But how can entrants learn from external knowledge when they lack the prior related knowledge that forms the basis of absorptive capacity? We theorize that the process of internal experiential learning facilitates learning from external knowledge, particularly for entrants. To test this theory, we examine learning using a comprehensive set of U.S. commercial banking firms, including a full census of entrants. Our estimates suggest that the share of vicarious learning realized in the process of experiential learning is twice as large for entrants as for incumbents. In this sense, entrants enjoy an “advantage of newness” in learning.