Various industries are marked by rapid technological change and increasingly global competition. We explain how such developments provide a context for “Red Queen” competition, where organizational learning and competition accelerate each other over time. Arguing that competition stimulates organizational development, we predict that organizations experiencing a history of competition are less likely to fail. This implies that a strategy of technological differentiation generates short-run survival advantages, but backfires over time as isolated organizations suffer from increasing rates of failure. Also, we argue that the Red Queen magnifies differences in competitiveness among organizations due to underlying differences in their propensities to learn, so that technologically leading organizations are especially strong competitors. This strength, paradoxically, makes technological leadership a hazardous strategy because technological leaders must compete against stronger rivals. We find support for these conjectures in a study of the worldwide hard disk drive market, estimating organizational ecology models that allow for increasing global competition over time and that help to explain national differences in organizational survival rates.
-
Faculty
- Academic Areas
- Awards & Honors
- Seminars
-
Conferences
- Accounting Summer Camp
- California Econometrics Conference
- California Quantitative Marketing PhD Conference
- California School Conference
- China India Insights Conference
- Homo economicus, Evolving
-
Initiative on Business and Environmental Sustainability
- Political Economics (2023–24)
- Scaling Geologic Storage of CO2 (2023–24)
- A Resilient Pacific: Building Connections, Envisioning Solutions
- Adaptation and Innovation
- Changing Climate
- Civil Society
- Climate Impact Summit
- Climate Science
- Corporate Carbon Disclosures
- Earth’s Seafloor
- Environmental Justice
- Finance
- Marketing
- Operations and Information Technology
- Organizations
- Sustainability Reporting and Control
- Taking the Pulse of the Planet
- Urban Infrastructure
- Watershed Restoration
- Junior Faculty Workshop on Financial Regulation and Banking
- Ken Singleton Celebration
- Marketing Camp
- Quantitative Marketing PhD Alumni Conference
- Rising Scholars Conference
- Theory and Inference in Accounting Research
- Voices
- Publications
- Books
- Working Papers
- Case Studies
-
Research Labs & Initiatives
- Cities, Housing & Society Lab
- Corporate Governance Research Initiative
- Corporations and Society Initiative
- Golub Capital Social Impact Lab
- Policy and Innovation Initiative
- Rapid Decarbonization Initiative
- Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative
- Value Chain Innovation Initiative
- Venture Capital Initiative
- Behavioral Lab
- Data, Analytics & Research Computing