Francesco Castellaneta

The Dimensions of Experiential Learning in the Management of Activity Load

Drawing on the attention-based view of the firm and the experiential learning literature, this paper develops and tests a theory on how firms learn to cope with the strains of activity load. We first empirically test the impact of activity load on the performance of a focal activity. We then study how this relationship is moderated by four dimensions of experiential learning: stock, homogeneity, pacing, and past success. We test our hypotheses on a proprietary database of 6,913 investments by 248 private equity firms in 77 countries between 1973 and 2008. We find that heavier activity loads exact a smaller toll on performance when firms have larger and more homogeneous stocks of prior experience. However, when firms’ prior experience is more rapidly paced or successful, the toll of heavier activity loads on performance grows. Taken together, these four dimensions of experiential learning provide an initial theoretical basis for the development of a capability that we term attention modulation capability.

Money Secrets: How Do Trade Secrets Affect Firm Value? Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment

We investigate the impact of trade secret legal protection on firm value in the context of acquisitions. On one hand, market value may increase because trade secret assets become better protected from rivals. On the other hand, market value may decrease because trade secret protection reduces information about the target and its competitors available to potential buyers, increasing uncertainty about the target’s value. Buyers will discount their offers in expectation of being compensated for riskier deals. Using a sample of private equity investments in the United States, we find that trade secret protection has a positive effect in industries with high mobility of knowledge workers, and a negative effect in industries with high uncertainty and a high proportion of “lemons.”

The Disadvantage of Incomplete Performance Feedback: Evidence from Private Equity–Backed Buyouts

We develop and test a theory of how organizations learn from performance feedback in the context of strategic decisions, where delayed outcomes result in performance feedback that is incomplete. In this context, firms facing a focal decision observe performance feedback for only a subset of their previous decisions. Using a sample of 7,223 private equity buyout investments, we find that incomplete performance feedback has a negative impact on the performance of a subsequent decision. Our results also suggest that incomplete performance feedback creates challenges when firms engage in problemistic search, reducing the well-established benefits of search for firm future performance. Moreover, this mitigating effect of incomplete feedback is stronger when performance falls below rather than exceeds aspirations.