Contact Shawna Sloan at [email protected] for any questions.
March 27
Carolyn Fu, Harvard Business School
Title: Setting the Stage: The Interplay of Firm Boundary and Learning at the Opera
10:30-11:50 a.m.
Location: B2560
Abstract: Vertical integration has traditionally been understood as having distinct learning advantages for how resources should be combined. It is thought that even as markets are leveraged to supply potentially superior individual resources, the firm should ultimately oversee how they come together, especially in settings of high problem complexity that require simultaneous adjustments to the overall resource combination. However, this paper demonstrates that under certain conditions, the coordination of how resources come together can, and even should, be delegated to the market as well. This is because markets may offer superior resource combinations as specialized producers explore novel partnerships with one another, especially in the case of a vibrant ecosystem. In fact, attempting to become more integrated in this setting can worsen performance, as it increases the amount of conflict between the resource choices of firms and the producers it relies on. This paper leverages a case study of an opera company to examine the real-world opportunities and challenges of delegating resource combinations to a market, and builds upon these insights with a computational simulation that deepens our understanding of when and how firms should leverage vertical integration versus a market of specialized producers in the search for effective resource combinations.
April 3
Title: Forecasting as a Problem of Cognitive Alignment: Evidence from Forecasting Tournaments in the Context of the Automotive Industry
10:30-11:50 a.m.
Location: B2560
Abstract: Forecasting the industry context in the face of significant uncertainty is critical for strategic decision making, and superior foresight has been deemed as an enabler of superior firm performance. We conceptualize forecasting as a problem-solving process shaped jointly by the cognitive capabilities of the forecaster and the structure of the forecasting problem, distinguishing between well-structured and ill-structured problems. We examine how individuals’ cognitive capabilities as captured through their domain expertise, forecasting expertise, and propensity for belief updating shape foresight across these problem types. Evidence from 6,405 forecasts made by 470 individuals from two successive year long forecasting tournaments reveals that belief updating was associated with superior foresight for well-structured problems relative to ill-structured problems. In contrast, forecasting expertise was associated with superior foresight for ill-structured problems relative to well-structured problems. Finally, domain expertise was associated with superior foresight for well-structured problems but it led to substantially greater variation for ill-structured problems, resulting in an overall null effect. These findings illuminate how superior foresight entails a dynamic alignment between individuals’ cognitive capabilities and the nature of the forecasting problem, and suggest that forecasting expertise, an underexplored construct in strategy research, could be an important source of competitive advantage.
April 17
10:30-11:50 a.m.
Location: R1240