Theory-Driven Strategic Management Decisions
研究了在缺乏历史数据的不确定性下，企业如何通过实验选择理论来制定战略决策，发现理论的不确定性越高、数量越多，实验价值越大，且决策者应优先实验更“意外”的理论以促进学习。
This paper studies strategic decisions under uncertainty for which past data are not available. It provides microfoundations of the theory-based view of the firm by showing that the strategic problem starts with the selection of theories rather than choosing actions and that theories are selected through experiments. The value of experimenting with theories increases with the number of theories and with their uncertainty. Moreover, uncertainty makes theories superadditive—that is, experimenting with a more uncertain theory increases the benefits of experimenting with other more uncertain theories. The paper also shows that decision makers should experiment with more “surprising” theories because in this case experiments are more informative and enable more learning. A leading example helps to illustrate our concepts throughout the paper. Funding: A. Camuffo and A. Gambardella acknowledge support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [Grant 101021061].