Adding to the Toolbox: Expert Perspectives on Conducting Experiments in Strategic Management

Abstract

Strategic management as a field is primarily concerned with examining and explaining performance asymmetries between firms, yet the field’s heavy reliance on archival studies and resulting lack of methodological diversity leads to endemic problems with endogeneity and the potential presence of confounding variables. Experimental methods are excellent for dealing with endogeneity, but level of analysis concerns, lack of reviewer acceptance, and other barriers have prevented their widespread use in the strategic management context. Nonetheless, scholars have successfully published papers on important strategic management topics that have served to consolidate past theoretical gains, serve as a platform for future work, and drive the field forward. The purpose of this symposium is to gather some of these scholars together to share their experiences publishing strategic management papers that included experiments. We hope to address both the theoretical benefits of how greater methodological diversity can improve individual papers and the field as a whole, and share very practical suggestions for how scholars can overcome the very real barriers to using such methods in this context. Importantly, the theme of the panel will not be that experiments should completely replace archival methods, or that archival methods are not valuable; rather, it will advocate that the field should “widen its toolbox” and exploit the benefits of a wider range of methods for the benefit of the field.