So!

apbox editorial essay

Information aggregation, matching and radical market hierarchy hybrids: Implications for the theory of the firm
Teppo Felin

Strategic Organization 9(2) 163173 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1476127011408250 soq.sagepub.com

Brigham Young University, USA

Todd R. Zenger

Washington University, USA

More than 65 years ago Friedrich Hayek parenthetically remarked that while man has learned to use [the market] . . he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it (1945: 528). The ensuing years have seen significant innovation in the structure and use of markets, including the infusion of market mechanisms into organizations (Zenger and Hesterly, 1997). However, the focus in extant theory of the firm scholarship has largely been on the markets high-powered incentives. But markets as we argue in this essay have additional features, such as information aggregation and matching. These novel features of markets have recently begun to receive managerial attention as organizations experiment with market-like practices such as crowdsourcing, information and prediction markets and open innovation. While we are descriptively learning much about these market-like practices and forms, nonetheless the theoretical foundations behind them, their implications for comparative governance (market vs hierarchy), their possible forms (markethierarchy hybrids) and implications for strategy and competitive advantage have yet to be fully vetted in the organizational literature. The purpose of this essay, then, is to step back and theoretically discuss the common threads that unite innovative practices such as prediction markets and crowdsourcing, and more importantly, to discuss their comparative implications for markets and organizations, as well as markethierarchy hybrids. We specifically focus on two, relatively neglected features of markets as a governance form features that give markets an advantage over firms and hierarchy: information aggregation and matching. We provide a contrast of the informational and matching-related assumptions associated with coordinating economic activity via the markets price mechanism versus hierarchy and organization, and highlight the potential gains from infusing the information aggregation and matching-related features of markets into organizations. While organizational scholars have certainly focused on the importance of information in organizations (Stinchcombe, 1990), and economists have highlighted the role that information

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plays in markets (e.g. signaling, information asymmetry; Spence, 1973; Stigler, 1961), nonetheless the markets capacity for information aggregation and matching has not been well integrated into our theories of the firm specifically, questions of comparative governance and radical markethierarchy hybrid forms of organization. Based on our discussion, and in the spirit of the So!apbox forum, we also speculate on possible areas of future research for the field of strategic organization.

Information aggregation in markets

Information aggregation and prices are the sine qua non of markets. The marvel of the market as Hayek put it is that prices embody the aggregate information of dispersed actors. Prices signal opportunities and thus act to coordinate the separate actions of different people and spontaneously direct resources (1945: 526). In markets, economic actors with differing expectations and information about the value of activities or resources come together and prices dynamically coordinate their actions and interactions. If an economic actor deems the price of a proposed activity or asset as too costly, she/he foregoes the activity or the purchase. The information that this choice provides along with the choices of myriad others is aggregated and this information is dynamically reflected in updated prices. These updated prices then, in turn, shape future choices. Overall, market prices essentially represent the aggregation of idiosyncratic and local knowledge and expectations about the value of resources, strategies and paths of action. Hierarchy provides a quite distinct alternative to markets and prices as a means of governance and as a form of information aggregation. Firms emerge because prices in markets fail to provide adequate information about opportunities or fail to adequately support, enable, or safeguard the pursuit of exchange (Williamson, 1985). Under these conditions, hierarchy and authority take the place of the price mechanism in the direction of resources due to the costs associated with transacting (Coase, 1937: 388). As articulated by Coase (1937), within firms an entrepreneur-co-ordinator directs resources and more generally coordinates production. Hierarchy relies on top-down coordination through fiat. As noted by Coase, an employee does not take actions within a firm because of a change in relative prices, but because he is ordered to do so (Coase, 1937: 387). In contrast, the market form is inherently more spontaneous and bottom-up in nature, as actions and choices are coordinated by information held by agents and information embedded in prices. Changes in prices trigger changes in the behavior of actors. But while we understand much about the role of prices and information in markets as a governance form, the loss of aggregate information that occurs as transactions are internalized as fiat replaces price has been underemphasized in the comparative institutional approach of transaction cost economics. Instead, the focus has been on the loss of high-powered incentives (Williamson, 1985; see also Zenger and Hesterly, 1997). But, in moving from market to hierarchy we also experience a dramatic loss in the aggregate information that markets provide the dispersed information of numerous individuals. The market, again, effectively filters and aggregates information from a vast array of heterogeneous actors. By comparison, authority and fiat are informationally more centralized (Foss, 2002). The burden to assemble and process information within hierarchy is placed more directly on a manager or entrepreneur (and their discretion) where it is, in some measure, implicitly assumed that hierarchy and management are endowed with the necessary expertise to make decisions (or even second-order decisions about who should make decisions). Therefore, at a very basic level, the choice between the use of market and hierarchy involves an assessment of whether the

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entrepreneur-manager (or a delegate) possesses adequate information and expertise to select a course of action or whether information in the form of proposals and prices from the vast and disparate resources in the market is preferred. Transaction cost economics (TCE) relative neglect of the markets role in information aggregation stems partly from the focus that it has on the governance of particular transactions, where questions of uncertainty and asset specificity are perhaps easier to dimensionalize. TCE partly presupposes that the entrepreneur-manager knows the optimal course of action and must simply decide how to structure incentives to get it done. Or, the assumption is that any mistakes in the governance of transactions are selected out by market forces (see, for example, Williamsons [1991] discussion of discriminating alignment). In other words, the focus in TCE is on the appropriate governance of transactions and assets, but far less is known about the necessarily subjective, informational component associated with making decisions about strategies and appropriate courses of action in uncertain situations (cf. Nickerson and Zenger, 2004). While the focus on efficient governance enables us to understand the markethierarchy nexus and boundaries, the approach diverts attention from the distinct informational properties of markets and hierarchies in guiding choices about what strategies to pursue in highly uncertain situations. In sum, from a comparative perspective, hierarchies then are informationally more restrictive than markets, in that they, in ideal form, rely on the discretion and choices of only those employed within the hierarchy, while markets necessarily have a more social, aggregational component as they potentially aggregate heterogeneous information and ideas, proposals and products from a more vast array of heterogeneous actors. Thus we argue that in selecting the market form of governance, the manager does more than impose high-powered incentives on actors to generate information and proposals for the firm. Rather, the manager imposes these incentives on a vast and heterogeneous set of agents with divergent information. Knowledge in markets is effectively more democratic, specifically as knowledge is dispersed among a wide range of actors, beyond the computational abilities or cognitive capacities of any one agent or even a limited set of actors within a centralized hierarchy (Hayek, 1945: 528). The efficient aggregation of highly diverse information sources is then the particular purview of markets rather than organizations.

Internal hybrids: Infusing information aggregation and price into organizations

While organizational economics often contrasts markets and hierarchies as two dichotomous forms of governance, as we have above, nonetheless much organizational and structural innovation is comprised of markethierarchy hybrid forms. Internal markethierarchy hybrids are forms of governance that attempt to selectively infuse market features and mechanisms into organizations (Foss, 2003; Zenger, 2002). The extant literature has largely focused on creating markethierarchy hybrids that infuse the markets high-powered incentives into organizations (Zenger and Hesterly, 1997). However, markets of course are not just about incentives but also have other properties that might fruitfully be used in crafting markethierarchy hybrids. More practically, the infusion of the markets high-powered incentives into firms presupposes that decision-makers have a rather accurate sense of the optimal course of action or a sense of how to structure its development and execution. But, the first-order problem of deciding what to do in the first place also deserves careful attention vis-a-vis governance. If critical information about what to do is widely distributed within the firm, then a key task of organizing is efficiently accessing and aggregating that information. While the infusion of market-like features into hierarchies

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has generally been restricted to delegation (Foss, 2003), imposed or negotiated transfer prices and high-powered incentives, more recent efforts also seek to capture the vast informational advantages of markets within hierarchies. The infusion of the information aggregation feature of markets into organizations thus in effect creating novel, markethierarchy hybrids is happening through a variety of novel organizational practices and forms. One specific way is the use of prediction markets (for a description, see Wolfers and Zitzewitz, 2004). At the extreme, some organizations have created full-blown, internal markets, complete with an artificial currency through which employees purchase and trade shares in initiatives or strategies, even allowing for futures contracts (Cowgill et al., 2009; Croxson, 2010). These artificial markets aggregate the opinions, beliefs and expectations of employees by allowing individuals to bet on the likely success of different products, on the success of a potential market entry or merger, or on any number of predictions that might be made about future alternatives. Most reports suggest that these artificial internal markets have been extremely successful in guiding organizational decision-making. Some of the most prominent firms engaged in these types of internal prediction markets include Google, Yahoo and Intel (for an overview of prediction and information markets, see Croxson, 2010; Hanson, 1999). The premise of these information markets is that the dispersed information from heterogeneous internal actors, aggregated into prices, provides superior guidance to senior management than any hierarchically organized decision process. The practice of creating prediction and information markets, then, effectively replicates the markets powerful, aggregate price signal, harnessing the dispersed information and knowledge of employees to make organizational decisions. Softer forms of information aggregation and associated market infusion take the form of employee surveys, voting, or opinion polls. A central premise of market-like forms of information aggregation is that dispersed individuals even non-experts have information and expectations that can be aggregated and harnessed toward organizational decision-making under uncertainty (cf. Deutsch and Madow, 1961). The market feature of price and information aggregation is fundamentally based on the premise and finding that collective judgment and information, in the aggregate, even if biased, can lead to improved prediction. Galtons (1907) infamous example of non-experts estimating the weight of an ox highlights this point: the median estimate of a crowd provides a remarkably precise answer. More importantly, even naive and biased information aggregation can do better than expert or managerial judgment (see e.g. Hong and Page, 2001; see also Hanson, 1999). The research findings on the precision of aggregate over individual or expert prediction in some settings are rather persuasive (for an overview, see Laughlin, 1999; Page, 2007). Not only are experts frequently found on all sides of an issue, but more generally experts do not necessarily escape simple judgment biases such as recency effects and escalation of commitment. Individual biases, then, in some sense cancel each other out when aggregated. And, of course, expert opinion may also aggregate to provide a valuable price-like meta-signal about appropriate courses of action (cf. Kerr and Tindale, 2004; Risse, 2003). For example, Bayesian inferences and estimates about the likelihood of events can be aggregated toward a more informed prediction or social choice in uncertain environments. Thus, the suggestion here is that, at times, hierarchy impedes rather than facilitates the flow and processing of aggregate information. Infusing more market-like forms such as prediction markets and price into hierarchy provides another information conduit to aid in determining the optimal course of action. Stepping back, the process of an organization collectively choosing a course of action through market-like information aggregation and associated practices can be viewed as a social choice (cf. Arrow, 1951). Thus, rather than rely solely on the information and strategic preferences of

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managers or principals, social choice-type intuition recognizes the heterogeneous information and preferences that individuals within an organization have about what to do. Indeed, a rich literature on mechanism design seeks to highlight forms of social aggregation that maximize informational inputs, incentives and the preferences of actors (Hurwicz, 1972; Sen, 1999). While scholars have looked at the power of delegating decision rights (Foss, 2003) where, for example, decisions and activities can be pursued independently of others within an organization (Knudsen and Levinthal, 2007) here we specifically focus on creative approaches for infusing the markets capacity to aggregate information toward a more optimal, social choice.

Matching in markets
A second feature of markets, related to information aggregation, is the markets capacity to match or sort. If we take seriously the logic of strategy: that value is created through the discovery of unique and complementary matches among assets and activities or, for example, matches between human capital and problems (or firms, e.g. Petrongolo and Pissarides, 2001) then the markets capacity to facilitate matching is one of its most essential and valuable features. Entrepreneurs and innovative managers actively seek efficient access to this matching function, increasingly through the creation of their own unique markets. The matching feature of markets has several basic properties. First, matching in markets requires a common information platform where economic actors entrepreneurs, individuals and firms broadcast needs, opportunities, jobs, talent, assets, solutions and problems. The broadcasting of information in markets provides an opportunity to make valuable comparisons across a set of alternatives, prices and possibilities, and then make matches accordingly (cf. Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010). Second, markets facilitate the participation of a heterogeneous set of actors with a variety of skills, abilities, preferences, information, expectations and opportunities. Economic actors have differing information and ideas, and the market as a forum allows for broadcasting this information and for matching and sorting by those with skills and matching interests. The inherent heterogeneity of demand in markets is guided by actors local and disparate information, beliefs and theories about the best course of action, providing a forum for complex matching, selfselection and sorting (Felin and Zenger, 2009). Third, while markets present entrepreneurs and managers with a vast array of choice combinations, markets can enable and support an efficient process of sorting and prioritizing relative to these combinations. They enable entrepreneur-managers to efficiently assess, update and execute their theories of value creation. Of course, while markets are sources of variety, the market process can also be seen specifically, over time as a variety-reducing mechanism. The price mechanism and matching feature of the market moves economic activity toward (though not necessarily to) equilibrium and spontaneous order as organizations are formed, relationships are established, resources are purchased, goals are set and opportunities are seized. Matching in markets therefore depends on a type of symmetry where, for example, the information of agents coincides or where a supplier and a buyer contract and agree on a price or where a candidate finds a job. Matching and sorting are mechanisms for creating a type of emergent equilibrium, a mechanism for creating order and alignment, emergent homogeneity from heterogeneous problems, solutions, individuals and economic actors. This equilibrium of course may not be stable. In fact, it is unlikely to be so, as information and prices continually shift and agents respond to their particular circumstances and information (Hayek, 1945). It is worth highlighting that the symmetry of market activity requires a two-way match and agreement between two economic agents, or even a match between information and opportunities

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(cf. Felin and Zenger, 2009). Note that the two-way matching feature of markets is comparatively different from firms. In firms, fiat, or at least more hierarchical decision-making, replaces the self-selection of markets. Naturally, some firms have also introduced the markets matching feature into organizations via radical forms of delegation (see Foss, 2003). Our central assumption is that most markets of critical interest to the entrepreneur-manager are not the markets of classical economic theory involving homogeneous suppliers selling homogeneous products to heterogeneous buyers, with no search costs. Rather, most markets, in which economic actors participate, are characterized by heterogeneous buyers and sellers, each with substantial private and difficult-to-extract information, and of course, significant search costs. A critical feature of these markets is the creation of optimal matches among assets and entrepreneurs matching information with opportunities, ideas with capital, problems with solutions, focal assets with their complements and employees with organizations (e.g. Petrongolo and Pissarides, 2001). Markets can match a broad array of sellers with buyers who possess the highest willingness to pay for products and proposals based on their own endowments of information and assets. The willingness or unwillingness to pay adjusts prices and shapes future behavior.

External markethierarchy hybrids: Crowdsourcing and other forms of matching

Firms can access the matching feature of markets in various ways. Of course, simple outsourcing is the most common means. However, outsourcing presupposes a great deal of understanding on the part of the entrepreneur-manager about what to do. In other words, the entrepreneur has a solution to procure rather than a problem to solve (cf. Nickerson and Zenger, 2004). Thus, outsourcing requires a detailed description of a part or service that will be procured. But some novel forms of accessing markets have gone well beyond this type of simple outsourcing and instead seek to match problems with problem solvers who essentially propose a course of action, activities that may be at the core of a firms strategy. Among the more intriguing efforts to access the matching feature of markets (coupled with information aggregation) involves the use of crowdsourcing to generate solutions to specific problems. Firms have essentially begun to broadcast sets of opportunities and problems highly specific to their firm to a wide array of market participants, including potential suppliers, customers, even competitors, who see these opportunities and can choose to address them (cf. Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010; see also Bingham and Spradlin, 2011; Dushnitsky and Klueter, 2011). Crowdsourcing, then, can be seen as the creation of a highly firm-specific market that encourages and directs participants to engage with firm-specific problems a form of an external market hierarchy hybrid. The central premise behind crowdsourcing (and similar practices) is to engage market actors with the focal firm in a process of generating a wide range of potential solutions to specific problems (cf. Nickerson and Zenger, 2004), thereby harnessing the proverbial wisdom of crowds. And, related to our notion of matching, crowdsourcing effectively creates a vehicle where individuals can self-select and choose to address particular problems. Crowdsourcing of course is only one of many, related practices that seek to engage a more global set of constituents (either outside or inside the organization). Information technology has enabled this type of market creation and information dissemination and matching and selfselection to occur on a considerably wider basis (cf. Autor, 2001). Furthermore, more recent forms of crowdsourcing have included innovation prizes and other platforms for facilitating the matching of problems and solutions. For example, among the more visible examples of crowdsourcing are Eli Lillys Innocentive initiative and platform (Bingham and Spradlin, 2011) and P&Gs connect

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and develop effort. Here individuals and organizations post requests and associated rewards related to addressing various problems. Beyond crowdsourcing, organizations also use information technology to structure large-scale, but proprietary procurement auctions where large numbers of suppliers bid for opportunities to supply a focal firm thus in effect creating a firm-specific market, or a type of external markethierarchy hybrid. Beyond the context of innovation within organizations, open and user-type innovation can also be seen as an effort to more effectively capitalize on the markets ability to generate solutions and match problems with solutions. Some scholars even suggest that open innovation provides its own, novel, third form of governance, community, network, or commons-based peer production materially different from traditional markets and hierarchies (e.g. Benkler, 2002; Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003). The central focus of the argument is that incentives are of less importance in these settings, where individuals are instead intrinsically motivated and decision-making is extremely decentralized. But, rather than completely dismiss the markethierarchy distinction, we think it is helpful to comparatively study the respective market-like and hierarchy-like elements manifest in open and user innovation. Scholars have indeed shown that these forms of organization feature important market-like elements such as incentives, though perhaps in different form (e.g. Lerner and Tirole, 2002). And, while research on open source innovation has focused on its communal nature (e.g. Benkler, 2002), market features seem to play a very central role even if money is not the medium of exchange. For example, the influential hacker and chronicler of open source innovation, Eric Raymond, notes that the [open source] world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved (2001: 52). Thus further research is needed on the comparative nature of open innovation-like forms, particularly as these relate to external or internal markethierarchy hybrid forms of governance. In all, crowdsourcing-like efforts are unique markethierarchy hybrids that capitalize on the markets matching capability and information aggregation as well as the initiative and resources of hierarchies and organizations. The exact comparative aspects of when and how crowdsourcingtype initiatives should be used are outside the bounds of this essay, though we hope they receive careful analytical attention in future work.

Open questions and future directions

In this essay we have introduced two central features of emergent markethierarchy hybrids information aggregation and matching or sorting. These two features raise a number of additional, important questions that relate to the theory of the firm and the field of strategic organization. First, a central question for the theory of the firm and strategic organization is the matter of aggregation. Specifically, extant theories of the firm tend to assume a singular entrepreneur-coordinator or manager who directs via fiat (Coase, 1937) and chooses a course of action. Thus, a next step is to study how individual-level factors subjective information, preferences and beliefs aggregate toward a collective course of action or social choice (cf. Malmgren, 1961). While extant work in strategy has looked at intra-firm dynamics associated with strategy (e.g. Burgelman, 1991), nonetheless the comparative analytics associated with aggregation (information, beliefs, etc.) deserve additional attention. The behavioral theory of the firm of course was originally attuned to questions of aggregation (e.g. March, 1963), but has not directly pursued aggregation-related points in more recent work. As recently noted by Gavetti et al., organizational research has been considerably less focused on linking individuals interests and cognitions to organizations actions

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and decisions (2007: 524). Areas of strategic management have also not sufficiently addressed these aggregational issues, particularly as they relate to the aggregation of information and expectations in factor markets. For example, strategic factor market theory focuses explicitly on a firms information and expectations relative to resources and strategies (see Barney, 1986) note that the firm is treated as a unitary actor in this context but there has been less work in strategy on how heterogeneous information and expectations aggregate and emerge from the set of individuals that constitute the organization. Our call for additional work on aggregation and matching, then, might also be seen as a natural next step for the microfoundations program in strategic organization (cf. Felin and Foss, 2005), specifically an effort to not just look at individual-level factors such as information, preferences, beliefs but to specifically study how these individual-level factors aggregate to the collective level at the organizationsmarket nexus. Second, the matching feature of markets and associated dynamics of sorting and self-selection has been neglected in the theory of the firm. Arguably, value creation amounts to assembling and creating optimal matches of physical and human assets, and information. At an abstract level, there are continual dynamics in markets where information is matched with opportunities, information is exchanged, assets are matched and individuals move and match with employees and so forth. These dynamics of course have significant implications for organizational size, boundaries and heterogeneity. Thus the theory of the firm requires additional theoretical advances to systematically address the matching and sorting feature of markets, both as it relates to the matching and sorting of talent (cf. Zenger, 1992), but also the matching of assets, activities, information and resources. For instance, what types of asset matches, once identified in markets, require integration to assemble? How are assets and human capital matched? Strategic management has only recently begun to study these types of dynamics for example by studying the mobility of talent and the associated implications for organizational boundaries and competitive advantage. Third, information aggregation and matching of course happen within embedded structures (Granovetter, 1985). Thus there are important questions about how extant social relations both in organizations and markets shape how information is aggregated and how matching and selfselection processes occur. For example, what are the ways in which decentralized practices such as prediction markets relate to formal structure and hierarchy? Or, how do market structures enable or constrain practices such as crowdsourcing? And more theoretically, how does the embeddedness of information aggregation and matching impact the boundary between organizations and markets? Our final, comparative, and quite practical question relates to how various information aggregation and matching-related features of markets and associated practices can be used by organizations (and in society more generally). For example, when should firms use internal informational aggregation (e.g. price and prediction markets) versus outsource these activities or problems (e.g. crowdsource)? A potential answer to this question focuses on the nature of the problem that is to be solved (see Nickerson and Zenger, 2004). That is, if the problem can somehow be modularized and decomposed, then market-based approaches to problem solving become feasible. But, additional questions remain. What are the comparative externalities associated with knowledge generated within the firm versus by the market? For example, crowdsourcing naturally has competitive implications (related to learning, competitive dynamics, etc.) that deserve to be addressed. And, whether information aggregation and matching is handled internally or externally, what are the appropriate ways of incentivizing this effort to maximize outcomes? Overall, in this essay we have strived to make both a theoretical and practical contribution. While we are descriptively learning much about practices such as prediction markets and crowdsourcing, the purpose of this essay has been to place these practices within a more general, comparative and theoretical framework. In short, we highlight two central, more neglected features of

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markets information aggregation and matching and discuss associated opportunities for internal and external markethierarchy hybrids. Our hope is that this essay elicits new work on comparative organization and governance, work that is managerially relevant and carefully addresses the comparative micromechanics and factors associated with aggregation and matching in markets and organizations. Acknowledgments
Thanks to Joel Baum and the coeditors of Strategic Organization for their developmental comments. We would also like to thank Alph Bingham, Nicolai Foss, Amit Gal, Peter Klein and Gordon Smith for their feedback. Central arguments from this essay were also presented at the University of Virginia (Darden), University of South Carolina and Lund University, Sweden feedback from these presentations helped improve our arguments. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Teppo Felin is an Associate Professor and Lee Perry Fellow at the Marriott School, BYU and a Visiting Fellow at Lund University, Sweden. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Emory University, Hanken School of Economics, and Aalto University. His current research interests include the microfoundations of organization theory, markets, social aggregation and emergence, organizational capabilities and design, social theory and the philosophy of science. His research has been published in Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Managerial and Decision Economics, Erkenntnis, Research in the Sociology of Organizations and other research outlets. He is on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review. He is currently co-editing a special issue of Organization Science on organizational economics and capabilities, as well as an interdisciplinary special issue of Managerial and Decision Economics on the emergent nature of the firm, markets and social aggregation. Address: Marriott School, Brigham Young University, 587 Tanner Building, Provo, UT 84602, USA. [email: teppo.felin@byu.edu] Todd R. Zenger is the Robert and Barbara Frick Professor of Business Strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis. He completed his PhD in strategy and organization from UCLA. Professor Zengers current research focuses on organizational boundaries and design, the mobility of scientists and engineers, value in relationships and corporate strategy. Professor Zengers research has appeared in Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Management Science and Strategic Organization. He has served or is currently serving on the editorial boards of many of these journals. He is currently coediting a special issue of Organization Science on organization economics and capabilities. Address: Olin Business School, Washington University, Campus Box 1133, One Brookings Drive, St Louis, MO 631304899, USA. [email: zenger@wustl.edu]

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