Calling It Quits: A Behavioral Perspective on Exploration and Exploitation in R&D Project Termination
研究了企业如何决定终止探索性还是利用性研发项目，发现并行项目数量、合作经验和公司业绩会影响这一偏好，对研发管理者和决策者有用。
ABSTRACT Not every R&D project will succeed, necessitating a careful selection of which R&D projects to pursue and which to terminate. Timely termination decisions free up scarce resources for more promising projects. Yet, prior research has yielded inconclusive results on how firms terminate exploratory versus exploitative R&D projects. Given that early‐stage R&D project termination is a decision made under high uncertainty, we adopt a behavioral perspective to reconcile the inconsistent findings. We propose that a firm's preference for terminating exploratory versus exploitative projects depends on three sources of contextual feedback: parallel projects, prior collaboration experience, and firm performance. We test our hypotheses using drug development projects from pharmaceutical firms over 11 years, finding that exploratory projects are less likely to be terminated relative to exploitative ones when the number of parallel projects is limited, when they are conducted with an existing partner, or when firm performance falls below aspiration.