The Dynamics of Interfirm Networks along the Industry Life Cycle: The Case of the Global Video Games Industry 1987-2007

In this paper, we study the formation of network ties between firms along the life cycle of a creative industry. We focus on three drivers of network formation: i) network endogeneity which stresses a path-dependent change originating from previous network structures, ii) five forms of proximity (e.g. geographical proximity) which ascribe tie formation to the similarity of actors' attributes; and (iii) individual characteristics which refer to the heterogeneity in actors capabilities to exploit external knowledge. The paper employs a stochastic actor-oriented model to estimate the - changing - effects of these drivers on inter-firm network formation in the global video game industry from 1987 to 2007. Our findings indicate that the effects of the drivers of network formation change with the degree of maturity of the industry. To an increasing extent, video game firms tend to partner over shorter distances and with more cognitively similar firms as the industry evolves.network dynamics, industry life cycle, proximity, creative industry, video game industry, stochastic actor-oriented model

When Drugs Kill: The Social Structure of Evidence Production

An Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) is defined by the World Health Organization as “a noxious response to a medication that is unintended at doses usually administered for diagnosis, prophylaxis, or treatment.” Estimates suggest that such episodes – in which prescription drugs cause negative health consequences – account for more than 2 million hospitalizations and more than 100,000 deaths per year in the United States alone, making ADRs one of the leading causes of death. To put these numbers into perspective: death from treatment with prescription drugs is about 10 times as common as death from suicide. This dissertation aims to understand why these numbers are so high. Prior work has focused mainly on the politics of drug approval to show that factors such as deadlines, status of pharmaceutical firms, and foreign approval can account for variation in regulatory decision making by the Food and Drug Administration. I take another route and focus on the production of evidence about the safety of prescription drugs. The way in which medical scientists have typically used evidence is by extracting meaning through aggregation or classification of pieces of evidence. The argument that I am making in this dissertation is that rather than aggregating or classifying evidence, one needs to account for the relationships between pieces of evidence. In particular, the dissertation shows how social theories about the structures of evidence production can be used to better understand the harm that drugs can do and, as a result, allow us to identify unsafe drugs more rapidly. The dissertation presents analyses based on data from the two main sources of evidence that the Food and Drug Administration has at its disposal to identify unsafe drugs. The first is the Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS). AERS is an FDA maintained system through which patients and physicians can voluntarily report ADRs to the FDA. The FDA uses this system by monitoring disproportional increases in the number of ADRs reported for a given drug. The second source of evidence is the scientific literature about prescription drugs. The FDA uses this literature to inform regulatory action. The first set of findings in this dissertation demonstrate that ADR reports for a specific drug are more likely to be submitted if a drug has been publicly scrutinized or when a drug treats the same health condition as a drug that was publicly scrutinized. Patients and physicians differ in the ways in which their reporting behavior changes in response to increased scrutiny. Preliminary findings suggest that these episodes of changes in reporting behavior are associated with delays in regulatory action compared to drugs in which reporting behavior did not change. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the detection of signals in massive yet sparse data benefits from social theories of evidence production. The second set of findings show that the social structure in which scientific evidence about the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs is not uniformly cumulative. In particular, in some cases the scientific debate about the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs is characterized by a disconnect between the claims made before a drug is approved for marketing and the claims made after approval. Moreover, the results from the study demonstrate that debates characterized by a strong disconnect are more likely to be the target of regulatory action. This suggests that a discontinuity in scientific closure is consistent with the idea that the quality of pre-approval scientific evidence predicts post-approval regulatory action. In sum, this dissertation identifies salient structures in collective production processes and it demonstrates that the structure of collective production reveals meaning that could reduce ambiguity in interpretation

Impression Management and the Biasing of Executive Pay Benchmarks: A Dynamic Analysis

We study the selection of peers into compensation peer groups reported by U.S. corporations. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation requires firms to report these peer groups which are used by investors and shareholders to benchmark the compensation of CEOs. Building on a novel, dynamic analysis of more than 1,400 compensation peer groups since 2006, this paper presents new evidence that compensation peer groups are biased upwards relative to neutrally chosen “natural” peer groups. This upward bias is masked by several factors including normative selection on other criteria than compensation and the strong negative relationship between bias and the percentile at the named peer group at which the CEO is compensated. We find that adjustments to compensation peer groups are often better explained as bias-maintaining impression management than as structural adjustments to align peer groups more closely with the normative principles for peer group selection. We also find that peer group bias cannot generally be explained away as a reward for CEO talent. Our research suggests that although the SEC regulation was intended to minimize rent extraction, it has given firms a tool to manage impressions of shareholders and justify excessive pay

Game Changer: The Topology of Creativity

This article examines the sociological factors that explain why some creative teams are able to produce game changers—cultural products that stand out as distinctive while also being critically recognized as outstanding. The authors build on work pointing to structural folding—the network property of a cohesive group whose membership overlaps with that of another cohesive group. They hypothesize that the effects of structural folding on game changing success are especially strong when overlapping groups are cognitively distant. Measuring social distance separately from cognitive distance and distinctiveness independently from critical acclaim, the authors test their hypothesis about structural folding and cognitive diversity by analyzing team reassembly for 12,422 video games and the career histories of 139,727 video game developers. When combined with cognitive distance, structural folding channels and mobilizes a productive tension of rules, roles, and codes that promotes successful innovation. In addition to serving as pipes and prisms, network ties are also the source of tools and tensions

Disruptive Diversity and Recurring Cohesion: Assembling Creative Teams in the Video Game Industry, 1979-2009

To test the proposition that a high level of recurring cohesion and a high level of stylistic diversity can combine for successful team performance, this study constructs a dataset of the careers of 139,727 individuals who participated in project teams producing 16,507 video games between 1979 and 2009. Findings indicate that teams with more dissimilar stylistic experiences outperform teams with more homogenous backgrounds, but only for higher levels of recurring cohesion. Teams with high diversity and high social cohesion are better able to harmonize the noisy cacophony of an (otherwise) excessive plurality of voices, thereby exploiting the potential beneficial effects of cognitive diversity

Gender-equal funding rates conceal unequal evaluations

Published online 18 October 2021Previous studies have found little or no systematic differences in the rates at which female and male scientists are awarded funding in international grant competitions. However, past investigations have only studied outcomes, not the preceding scoring and selection process. We propose that common grant review practices–such as panel deliberations, score binning, and interview assessments–allow unequal evaluations to be corrected while staying within a framework of merit-based review. We analyzed unique data from a large funding competition, the Netherlands’ Organization for Scientific Research's Talent Program, including reviewer and panel evaluation scores of both funded and unfunded proposals. We replicate prior research demonstrating gender equity in funding outcomes. At the same time, we find that men received higher evaluation scores, consistent with our argument. This gender difference is counteracted by panels funding women with lower scores than men's, redistributing 64 million euro back to women that would otherwise have gone to men. Our study thus reveals that female scientists are more poorly evaluated than their male counterparts in spite of what equality in outcome statistics might suggest

Do grant proposal texts matter for funding decisions?: A field experiment

Scientists and funding agencies invest considerable resources in writing and evaluating grant proposals. But do grant proposal texts noticeably change panel decisions in single blind review? We report on a field experiment conducted by The Dutch Research Council (NWO) in collaboration with the authors in an early-career competition for awards of 800,000 euros of research funding. A random half of panelists were shown a CV and only a one-paragraph summary of the proposed research, while the other half were shown a CV and a full proposal. We find that withholding proposal texts from panelists did not detectibly impact their proposal rankings. This result suggests that the resources devoted to writing and evaluating grant proposals may not have their intended effect of facilitating the selection of the most promising science