Vicarious Experimentation: Do Innovators Learn by Being Imitated?
研究提出创新者可以通过观察模仿者的选择和结果来学习，尤其是当模仿者近乎克隆其产品时，这种替代性实验能帮助创新者克服因果模糊性，提升下一代产品质量。
Strategy scholars conventionally view imitation as a one-way knowledge transfer from an innovating firm to an imitating firm. We propose that being imitated also serves as a source of learning for the innovator. An innovator learns by being imitated—observing the imitator’s choices and outcomes and comparing them to its own. A key challenge in such learning, and in vicarious learning more broadly, is causal ambiguity in identifying the factors that drive observed performance outcomes. We theorize that an innovator’s learning by being imitated is particularly effective in overcoming causal ambiguity when it takes the form of vicarious experimentation, where an imitator’s near-clone of the innovator’s product functions as a quasi-experimental treatment from which the innovator can learn. This concept extends the logic of strategic experimentation by highlighting how firms can learn from experiments they do not control. We test our theory in the video game industry, demonstrating that vicarious experimentation enhances the quality of the innovator’s next-generation product and offering support for the theorized boundary conditions under which this effect holds.