Date of Award
4-30-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Chair and Committee
Anne Marie Knott
Committee Members
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Abstract
Knowledge spillovers can be a major driver of performance for those who successfully absorb them. This dissertation studies potential spillover recipients and characterizes how they may best benefit from the knowledge generated and possessed by their peers. Across three interconnected chapters, I examine whether the choice of peer whose spillovers a would-be recipient draws from affects the recipient’s outcomes. My pursuit is guided by the overarching question: who should knowledge seekers target as ideal sources of new knowledge? I focus my investigation on the extent of a source’s knowledge relative to the focal recipient – what I term knowledge distance – and study its relationship with the recipient’s subsequent performance to understand how recipients accumulate knowledge, and how they should make decisions on who they attempt to learn from. Chapter 1 uses as its foundations the body of R&D research in strategy and economics, and the body of research on interorganizational learning to construct a theory of who to learn from, exploring the tradeoff between learning opportunity (the extent of potentially exploitable knowledge possessed by a source that an aspiring recipient stands to benefit from) and the recipient’s capacity to effectively assimilate the knowledge possessed by a given source. I show that the answer to this dissertation’s question of interest depends in large part on the functional form assumptions for assimilation capacity, and present two alternative models of spillover absorption that differ only in how I conceptualize assimilation capacity. In one model, spillover absorption is increasing in knowledge distance. In the second, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge distance and spillover absorption. Chapter 2 empirically evaluates the predictions from the two alternative models employing microdata on individuals embedded within eSports teams interacting in the competitive eSports game Call of Duty: Warzone. I find support for the second model, which suggests that there exists an optimal knowledge distance between any source and recipient pair that maximizes learning for the recipient. Chapter 3 extends these findings to a firm-level setting, examining the interfirm mobility patterns of individual developers in the computer and videogame development industry. Results are consistent with those in Chapter 2, and with the second model characterized in Chapter 1. The three chapters are all parts of a whole, and together connect ostensibly disparate theories and assumptions in the R&D spillovers and interorganizational learning literatures, and shed light on optimal learning behavior for would-be knowledge recipients.
Recommended Citation
Pasipanodya, Tatenda Marume Geofrey, "Who Should You Learn From? Theory and Evidence from the Videogame Industry" (2024). Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 41.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/olin_etds/41