The tangled relationship between performance and suppliers: lessons from Formula 1

Team managers try to trace underperformance to its origins by evaluating the track record of other teams using the same engine supplier, write David Clough and Henning Piezunk

Collaborations that hurt firm performance but help employees' careers

When a firm and a competitor collaborate with the same partner, they compete for the shared partner's resources and attention. Such“peer competition”has been shown to negatively affect a firm's access to resources and its performance.One might expect that also the employees’ careers to suffer as a result. However, we argue that the firm's employees benefit from such collaborations. They lever-age these collaborations to build social capital—helping their mobility and careers. We find empirical support for our theory using a large sample data set of video game companies. Our study points to an important yet hitherto neglected agency conflict: employees seek interfirm collaborations that benefit them person-ally but hurt their firm

Training with AI: evidence from chess computers

Data de publicació electrònica: 22 de maig de 2023We suggest that AI can help decision-makers learn; specifically, that it can help them learn strategic interactions by serving as artificial training partners and thus help them to overcome a bottleneck of scarce human training partners. We present evidence from chess computers, the first widespread incarnation of AI. Leveraging the staggered diffusion of chess computers, we find that they did indeed help chess players improve by serving as a substitute for scarce human training partners. We also illustrate that chess computers were not a perfect substitute, as players training with them were not exposed to and thus did not learn to exploit idiosyncratic (“human”) mistakes. We discuss implications for research on learning, on AI in management and strategy, and on competitive advantage