gabriel rossman, pirate!

Our friend and guest blogger emeritus, Gabriel Rossman, has an article in the Atlantic on the subject of piracy. Gabriel uses piracy as an opportunity to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of traditional economic explanations. The key point is that people will often rely on ideas of what is “fair” versus an application of price theory.

Although the discipline of economics has many valuable things to teach us about how markets work, especially in the long-run, the subjective experience of someone bargaining does not necessarily reflect thinking through how a rational actor would apply price theory (competitive markets) or game theory (monopolistic markets) to the situation. Rather people take moralized approaches to exchange and seem to apply various relational models to exchange, which includes not only market exchange but also gift exchange, patron-client ties, and primitive communism. Moreover, even when people accept that a situation is one of market exchange it does not come naturally to think of price like modern economists think of it, as “market clearing.” Rather much as people intuitively expect physical objects to behave by Buridan’s impetus rather than Newton’s inertia, people’s intuitive notions about price can have less to do with how economics thinks of it than how Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx thought of it, as “just price” or “fair price.”

Recommended.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

pirate party social movement

The pirate party movement is very active here in Finland — the Pirate Party became an officially recognized party here today, garnering the needed 5000 signatures.  I did not really know about the movement until now, predictably the wiki site on the Pirate Party is very instructive.

The movement started in Sweden just three years ago and has now spread across the globe. The party’s agenda centers exclusively on these three issues:

Reform of copyright law.

An abolished patent system.

Respect for the right to privacy.

Very interesting.  Look like an interesting setting to study organizing and movements.

what’s the next, game-theoretic move by the pirates?

So, this weekend’s stealth operation by US Navy snipers sort of changed the rules of the game.  What do the pirates do next and how does the civilized world respond?  How do you think the civilized world versus pirates game will evolve from here?

this is what $3 million looks like … when it’s parachuted to pirates as ransom

According to the Daily Mail, owners of the captured Sirius Star paid $3,000,000 and had it parachuted onto the boat. Ironically, some of the pirates died as they tried to get away with the ransom, they were drowned by choppy waters while fighting over the money. Previous orgtheory pirate posts: Brayden on Pete Leeson, me on on Pete Leeson,.

fun weekend reading – pirate an-arrgh-chy

Brayden

Pirate alert!  Remember that cool working paper about pirates and democracy that Fabio linked to last summer?  It is now in print in the Journal of Political Economy, “An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization.” In the paper Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason, examines the organizational structure of pirate ships, comparing them primarily with merchant ships. Pirates, in contrast to the autocratic authority structure of merchant ships, developed democratic mechanisms of governance, complete with checks-and-balances and constitutions. The democratic governance system of pirates ensured that no single officer on the ship could dominate and abuse his authority for personal gain. In comparison with merchant ships, pirate ships did not face the principal-agent problem. Pirates owned their own ships (or at least occupied them without rent) and could take all of the booty for themselves, whereas merchants worked for landlubbers who owned the assets of the ship. Leeson’s conclusion is that pirate democracy was a response to the economic conditions of piracy.

One of the interesting insights of Leeson’s study is that pirates were one of the first groups to develop democracy as a form of governance.

The institutional separation of powers aboard pirate ships predated its adoption by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century governments. France, for example, did not experience such a separation until 1789. Nor did the United States. The first specter of separated powers in Spain did not appear until 1812. In contrast, pirates had divided, democratic “government” aboard their ships at least a century before this (pg. 1066).

Here is Leeson’s website. I can’t help but chuckle at the prominent skull and crossbones directly above his title as the “BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism.” If you wondered how an assistant professor starting in 2005 has rapidly advanced to full professor, check out Leeson’s loaded CV.  Peter is also a regular at the Austrian Economists blog.

pirate democracy?

Fabio

A loyal reader insisted I add this pirate pic…

Pete Leeson at West Virginia economics has a working paper on the social organization of pirates. More cute-o-nomics? I’d say no, it’s actually a meaty theoretical paper on the governance of criminal enterprises, using historical evidence from pirates to explore how ships operated as proto-democratic organizations. It’s a combination of history and game theory explaining why pirate ships didn’t devolve into bitter internal warfare. Some interesting points:

• Pirate crews were large complex organizations. The modal crew size was about 120, with crews of 150-200 possible. Some crews were so large they required multiple ships. They were also highly successful – they captured most predated ships and collected huge sums of money.
• Leeson identifies the main problem of ships as “captain predation.” What is to stop a ship’s captain from mistreating the crew? In Navy ships, this was a rampant problem. As king like entities, captains routinely abused crews. This drove a lot of seamen into piracy, because pirate captains were less abusive.
• How did pirates solve the “captain predation” problem? Leeson claims they had “piratical” checks and balances. They actually had multiple branches of pirate authority – the captain who wielded absolute power in battle, and a democratically elected quartermaster who you could appeal to in non-emergency situations.
• There even pirate constitutions, public rules and information developed to determine the power of captains and quartermasters.

More interesting points: division of powers on pirate ships predates their adoption in governments, piratical constitutions became well known rules of conduct, and there was also a right of secession – if you didn’t like the “articles” of your ship, you were free to leave. Definitely a stimulating read.

anarchism week at orgtheory

What the heck, let’s do anarchism week. Let’s start with the following conversation I had at the end of my social theory class a few semesters ago. A student approached me and asked why I didn’t teach anarchism in the course. There’s a few good reasons, but not so strong that you couldn’t include it if you really wanted to.

First, the goal of my social theory class is to have people read original texts written by seminal social thinkers. This doubles as a sort of Western civ (since IU doesn’t require it) and people need to understand the core arguments of sociology. So we hit the “classics,” the interactionists, feminists, French theory,* and a little evolutionary psych. The course also needs to prepare a handful of students who will continue in soc, poli sci, or other fields at the graduate level.

Second, I teach things that really drive discussion in contemporary sociology, which means that that many topics, including those dear to my heart, must get cut. Since there are very few anarchist sociologists, or research that uses an anarchist perspective, it means that it simply isn’t a priority.

But that doesn’t mean that anarchism isn’t a real social theory or that it should be actively excluded. In contrast, there’s now a body of anarchist themed social writings, mainly in fields other than sociology. For example, anthropologist David Graeber’s writings should count. James Scott, the political scientist, has written about statelessness at length. There are the classic anarchists, like Prodhoun, and feminist anarchists like Emma Goldman. You have right wing anarchists like economist Murray Rothbard or philosopher Michael Huemer. Then you have empirical studies of statelessness like Pete Leeson’s pirate book.

In other words, you have more than enough material and it’s high quality material. But it’s definitely not central to sociology (yet?), so you don’t feel guilty cutting it. But the social theory course isn’t set in stone. I am already tiring of French theory and other topics, so it may be time to rotate some new material in.

Fight the Power … with these books!: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

* Remember, I don’t teach postmodernism anymore.

Blogging Fast and Slow: Being an Account of the Author’s Misadventures in Guest-Blogging, with Some Musings on the Genre’s Pitfalls and Pathological Forms (and Jonah Lehrer)*

Hi, Tom Medvetz here with my final OrgTheory guest post. I thought I’d bring my discussion full circle in this one by returning to the general theme with which I began—namely, “reflexivity”—albeit now with some reflections on the blogging genre itself. As my earlier posts have illustrated, sometimes with painful clarity, I’m no blogger by training. To be honest, I don’t even read academic blogs very often. So it was with a certain curiosity that I ventured into this arena over the last couple of months—first, by writing a few entries myself, and second by paying attention to some of the top social science blogs. What did I learn from this? If you’re a longtime academic blogger or blog-reader, some of it might seem obvious to you, but hopefully it will also contain a novel twist, like reading an ethnography about your home country.

In the first place, it’s clear that the “rules” of academic blogging are different from—and sometimes even apparently at loggerheads with—the rules of scholarship. Part of a blog’s appeal, in fact, is that its default style is casual, not formal, and its “temporality” is fast, not slow. If you’re a scholar, blogging seems to free you at least momentarily from some of the constraints of academic discourse, and without forcing you to abandon altogether your scholarly authority. As other people have mentioned on this site, blogging can bring certain payoffs that complement the research enterprise nicely. I’ve come to think of the relationship between these payoffs and academic research in terms of a temporal metaphor:

(1) “Pre-scholarly” dividends

On the one hand, blogging offers certain benefits that I’d call “pre-scholarly” because they’re oriented to the goal of generating ideas that can be developed further in research. Here blogging is like “freewriting,” a la 3^rd grade English class, wherein the point is to “put some thoughts down on paper” and get them flowing without having to worry too much about whether they’re actually right or wrong. To say something on a blog, after all, isn’t to put it On The Record per se—and in any case it’s very easy to go back the next day and strike it from the record. (In fact, you could even argue that this “zig-zag” style of blogging is very efficient for conveying a sense of thoughtfulness while also doubling your output, which is a real issue if you’re a blogger. My point being: Who has something worthwhile to say every day? Certainly not I.)

(2) “Post-scholarly” dividends

Conversely, blogs can also be a medium for summarizing or disseminating research results in a very authoritative and definitive style. Writing in a quasi-journalistic mode, an academic blogger can report on the scholarly Events of the Day without having been a part of the action itself. To me, the most interesting thing about this payoff is that it appears to be based on a kind of “meta-objectivity,” by which I mean a position of implied distance from the object in which the object is itself a world where authority flows already to those who effectively cultivate a stance of objectivity and distance.

There’s no doubt, then, that blogs have a certain seductive appeal to them, especially in their promise to combine these payoffs. And I should emphasize that I don’t consider either payoff to be “false.” In fact, over the last month I’ve seen some truly virtuoso examples of academic blogging, both on this site and on some related ones. Overall, then, count me as a cautious fan of academic blogging. However, because I’m both an admirer of Durkheim and a confirmed pessimist, my first impulse whenever I see something seemingly innocuous or good is to go looking for its pathological forms. (Yeah, I know what you’re thinking and you’re correct: I am great at parties.)

You don’t have to look very far to find academic blogging’s pathological forms. The most obvious would have to be the hubristic style of blogging which, by imagining itself as merging the pre- and post-scholarly stances I just described, also makes a subtle claim to exist in between them—as if being an academic blogger somehow makes you a better scholar. As a blogger, you can post your anecdotal observation-in-need-of-further-investigation one minute and then switch to your Ted Koppel-style Summarizing Voice of Authority the next, the implication being that you also operate quite comfortably in between those bookends. Now I’m sure that an Inveterate Blogger would say that there’s no such message built into the act of blogging. Fair enough, I’d say, but this only brings us back to our original question: Why blog? Given the focus of my earlier posts, it should come as no surprise that I see in the “will to blog” something other than a megalomaniacal impulse or a straightforward result of the growth of new media technologies. Instead, I think the popularity of academic blogging has to be understood in relation to other developments in the intellectual field over the last four decades, including the proliferation of “new cultural intermediaries” and intellectual bridging figures, the development of a space of “organized punditry,” and the rise of think tanks and “policy experts.”

As I mentioned above, there’s no question that bloggers can, in their best moments, act as intellectual bridging figures between disparate worlds, such as those of policy, media, and research. But I think embedded in the larger story is a cautionary tale, especially for younger scholars. For instance, if you’d asked me to name the quintessential intellectual bridging figure in America just four months ago, I would have named Jonah Lehrer, the now-discredited neuroscience journalist who went from research assistant in a Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist’s lab to a Rhodes Scholarship, and then on to the land of Wired magazine and TED talks. Lehrer skipped the part where you actually master “straightforward” scientific research and moved immediately into the role of an intellectual bridging figure.

I find his story very interesting, not just because he’s the latest inductee into the Pantheon of Disgraced Journalists already inhabited by people like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. More interesting, I think, are the striking continuities between Lehrer’s “sins” and the qualities that made him successful in the first place. These continuities in turn reveal the supreme ambiguity of the bridging role he tried to play. The last straw for Lehrer, reputation-wise, was the revelation that he had fabricated quotes in his most recent book. This was an unambiguous ethical breach by any professional code of conduct, be it scholarly, journalistic, or otherwise. However, to focus only on this last stage of his downfall would be to miss its connection to the previous ones. I’m referring, first, to the intermediate stage in which Lehrer was dogged with the awkward charge of “self-plagiarism,” and second, to the earliest critiques of Lehrer, which date roughly to the moment he first stepped into the public eye. Even these critiques, I would argue, contained the seeds of his undoing. In a 2007 review of his first book Proust Was a Neuroscientist (published when Lehrer was just 26), Jonathon Keats presciently charged that Lehrer’s work was governed by “trivial” choices and “reductionist” tendencies; that it “arbitrarily and often inaccurately illustrat[ed] the sciences with works by artists”; and that it “embodie[d] an approach to the humanities and sciences that threaten[ed] the vitality of both.”

 Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) succumbs to the dark side of the Force, journalistically speaking, in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass.

The common thread across these critiques, in a word, is shortcuts. Jonah Lehrer took too many shortcuts. But how could you avoid taking shortcuts if your public reputation was based on your supposed ability to synthesize and reinterpret work from numerous fields, translate it into an easily digestible style, and engage in rapid, voluminous production—particularly at such a young age? (Lehrer published four books by the age of 30 and wrote columns and/or blog postings for several major outlets, including Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian.) Despite all the disfavor heaped on him, no one has ever accused Lehrer of being an out-and-out fraud. I find this, along with the fact that much of the offending work was hidden in plain sight for months (or even years) before anyone called him out on it,† to be very telling. Both points speak to a constitutive ambiguity in the intellectual bridging role Lehrer was attempting to play. His loss of public legitimacy wasn’t sudden, but followed a slow, steady progression from “He’s not quite the virtuoso he wants us to believe he is” to the more concrete but still vague, “He recycled his own material, and that’s… not right, is it?” to the final, damning, “Dude, he just made up that Bob Dylan quote.”

In summary, I hope you can see that my view on academic blogging is double-sided and that this is not a critique of the medium itself. As an Inveterate Blogger would point out, any broad slam against blogging would have to rely on sloppy generalizations, fuzzy and impressionistic thinking, and straw men. I’ll leave aside the obvious retort—namely, that generalizations, fuzzy thinking, and straw men are precisely what blogs enable you to get away with so easily—and focus instead on the main point, which is that academic blogging’s attractions seem to come at the cost of ambiguity: ambiguity about the “rules” of a good blog, ambiguity about the ultimate goals and payoffs, and ambiguity about the proper relationship between blogging and research. When viewed in this light, the “constraints” of scholarly research begin to look more like forms of freedom to me.

_________________________________________________

NOTES

* The title of this post refers to two “Daniels”: Kahneman, whose 2012 book you should definitely check out if you haven’t already, and Defoe, whose titles generally had that cool 18^th century flair about them and ran roughly the length of a typical blog post.

† And I mean really plain sight, as in New York Times Bestseller List plain sight.

a physicist, psychologist, mathematician, economist, orgtheorist…walk into a bar…and talk about collective behavior

A few years ago I was spending quite a bit of time looking at how scholars across disciplines (from the natural sciences to different social sciences) deal with matters of collective behavior, coordination and social aggregation.  Mathematicians and physicists study various issues related to the matter (e.g., signals, aggregation in networks), as do biologists (e.g., collective animal behavior), political scientists (e.g., voting), economists (e.g., preference aggregation), psychologists (social interaction) and sociologists (social influence).  Naturally there are significant differences (e.g., across social contexts and species), but I presumed that much can be (and already has been) learned across disciplines.

I pitched the idea of putting together an interdisciplinary special issue on collective behavior and social aggregation and the journal Managerial and Decision Economics was willing to take the risk (big-time thanks to the editor Paul Rubin!).  After a couple years of work, the special issue will finally be published this year— it is titled “the emergent nature of organization, markets and wisdom of crowds.”

The set of scholars contributing include folks from political science (Scott Page), physics (Claudio Castellano), mathematics (David Sumpter), sociology (Robb Willer, Siegwart Lindenberg), strategy (Nicolai Foss), economics (Bruno Frey, Bart Wilson, Peter Leeson), psychology (Steve Kozlowski), etc.

For anyone interested, the list of all the paper titles and contributors can also be found below the fold.  The final papers will be available on MDE’s early view over the next couple weeks.  One of the special issue papers is already there: Pete Leeson, of pirate political economy fame, and Chris Coyne’s paper on “Wisdom, Alterability and Social Rules.”

I’m still quite enamored by the possibilities of more systematically looking at comparative similarities and differences across disciplines (issues of collectives, behavior and aggregation – as well as comparative methodological and epistemological matters), so if anyone is interested in these issues, please send me a note.  I’m entertaining the idea of putting together a conference in the future.

what’s the right price for a hostage?

On the Atlantic blog, former orgtheory guest blogger, Gabriel Rossman, runs through the complications in deriving the price pirates should ask for a hostage.

[M]uch like how most people who haven’t studied statistics balk at the idea that the ratio of sample size to population size is irrelevant to statistical inference, people seem to have a strong intuition that the “market price” is relevant to a bilateral monopoly even though the whole idea of a bilateral monopoly is that there is not really a market but only a series of discrete one-off transactions. In the absence of substitutability, “comparable” transactions are irrelevant as they don’t imply opportunity cost. This is the main thing I found so fascinating about the Planet Money episode, over and over again the hostage’s party balked at the pirates demands as unreasonable in being out of line with the “market price.” We only get the pirates’ story second hand, but apparently at no point did they explain to the hostage’s party that “market price” doesn’t really exist in a bilateral monopoly. (Maybe Mogadishu University needs a better econ department).

There are two ways, which are only partially incompatible, to look at why people insist that there is a market price. The simple model is to see us as making Bayesian inferences about the price the other party is willing to accept. If a pirate asks me for $10 million when I know that previous ransoms for similar hostages from similar pirates were about $1 million, I face two possibilities. It may be that I’m facing an usually greedy or unreasonable pirate and $10 million really is the price from which he will not budge. However it seems more likely that I’m dealing with a regular pirate, who like most pirates in the past will ultimately settle for about $1 million but who is just floating a high initial figure in case I’m especially bad at this. In this sense the distribution of prices for similar transactions may not be directly relevant in the sense of providing opportunities for substitution (or the credible threat to avail myself of them) but it is still relevant as information about the zone of possible agreement. This is consistent with the Planet Money story in that Filipinos are cheaper to ransom than Europeans by an order of magnitude.

I’m amazed that pirates negotiate at all. Doesn’t this diminish their control? Do kidnappers do the same thing? Given that all of my knowledge of kidnapping scenarios is based on movies, my sense is that kidnappers try to avoid negotiation as this just seems to be a tactic used by law enforcement to ferret out their position. Why wouldn’t pirates operate by the same code?

keep the internet uncensored – call your representative today

Dear orgtheory readers:

As Teppo noted today, there is now a proposal in Congress that attempts to curb online privacy (“Stop Online Piracy Act”). The goal of fighting piracy is admirable. As a self-publisher of e-content, I enjoy being paid for my work. However, as written, SOPA requires providers to actively monitor all links and be responsible for user behavior. Furthermore, SOPA and a related bill, PIPA, gives various private and public groups the power to essentially censor the internet on the pretext of fighting pirated content. Read the summaries at Wikipedia here and here.

If you agree that the current bills create dangerous opportunities for censorship, please call your representative. The Elecrtonic Freedom Foundation has a website that tells you how to do it. All you need to do is make a quick phone call and tell the staff member that you oppose these bills. It takes less than a minute. I have already called Rep. Todd Young and Senator Dick Lugar and I have urged them to vote against these bills.  Elected representatives do respond to public pressure.

Fighting online piracy is important and we all benefit from an Internet where businesses can make a profit, but this shouldn’t come at the expense of giving various groups the power to censor the Internet through litigation and state fiat.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

wikipedia blackout and SOPA

Despite its many problems, I use wikipedia, a lot.  Too much.  Sure enough, just now I tried to dig something up – and got the wikipedia blackout page.  Given the blackout-  where will we quickly read up on SOPA (or whatever else)?

The SOPA thing is a complicated matter – a fascinating tension between protecting intellectual property and free speech.  At the extreme – should online sites like Pirate Bay (free movies, music and books) be allowed to operate freely?  Few people say “yes” to that one (including Jimmy Wales), so the questions emerge in the gray areas. But SOPA itself is a mess, no question.

social organization of piracy

If you’ve got an idle hour sometime in the next couple days — I highly, highly recommend this EconTalk podcast from two days ago: Leeson on Pirates and the Invisible Hook. The discussion covers all kinds of engaging issues: the social organization of pirates, governance, recruiting, incentives and motivation, pirate strategies, etc.  Here’s the book (by Princeton University Press): The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Previous orgtheory Pirate posts, including previous references to Leeson’s work, here.

As a side note, two plugs.

1) EconTalk is fantastic (my iPod-capable device generally downloads the latest edition within days of it being broadcast, and thus I don’t have idle moments any more).

2) Is Princeton University Press brilliant, or what?  I love their book selection, fantastic —  a visit to their “new in print” section usually always yields something that is a must-read.

thursday afternoon links: econ and education edition

1. Arrrrghhh!!! Pete Leeson, pirate economist, will be visiting at Chicago next academic year.  Watch out for ships sporting a game theory flag in Lake Michigan. Previous orgtheory posts on Leeson’s pirate research.

2. Remember my discussion of paying kids to learn? The early results of the Fryer experiment are in: increases in test taking, not scores. I don’t think this refutes the concept of incentives – there are lots of obvious cases of people studying hard for money (e.g., med school applicants). But the incentives have to be compatible with context. Will a few hundred bucks be enough to make kids overcome crummy schools, the lures of social life, and the otherwise bad post-graduation prospects? Probably not.

3. Over at Orgs and Markets,  two posts on university salaries. This one on public schools and this one on private schools.

the chinese regulation of the internet

Fabio

The Atlantic has a new article by James Fallows on the Chinese government’s regulation of the Internet. Using a few basic tools, the Chinese government is surprisingly good at regulating the content of email and websites. The name for this, “The Golden Sheild Project,” implies that the Chinese state is out to protect its citizens from subversive content. You might think that this contradicts the main point of the Internet, which is that it’s decentralized. The Chinese, however, built the internet with a small number of traffic points so it could be easily regulated.

friday morning links – steve jobs edition

Fabio

1. The wiki entry on Steve Jobs.

2. The film made about the epic battle between Jobs and Bill Gates: Pirates of Silicon Valley.

3. Jobs’ wonderful speech at Stanford, probably one of the best commencement speeches.

4. A fake interview with Jobs.

5. The Jobs inspired concept of the “reality distortion field.”

6. Jobs introduces the iPod for the first time in public.

7. Mad TV pokes fun at Jobs’ personality cult.

8. Mad TV’s wicked satire of Jobs, with a political twist.

trying to explain charlie brown

Brayden

Karrie and I had a wonderful weekend driving down to Santa Barbara with my brother and his wife to attend the wedding of a good friend. It was nice to get a little time away from the busy-ness of family and work life. One of my favorite parts of road trips, the enjoyment of which has been somewhat diminished since having three children, is stopping at the out-of-the-way places that litter our highways and getting a taste of rural American culture. I discovered one of my new all-time favorite nooks on this trip: Charlie Brown Farms in Little Rock, California. Words really can’t describe the weird, zany feel of this store. The layout is more like a maze than a store. You can spend an hour in the place and still not see all of the passageways filled with bits of Americana, kitschy keepsakes, and trivial merchandise. In one room you’ll find a corner with sculptures of monkeys in every imaginable position, crates full of various snack foods (including spicy dried mango, yummy!) in another, and directly ahead life-sized statues of the Blues Brothers and an almost naked pirate princess swinging from a rope in the ceiling. Click on the tour link on the menu and you’ll get a little sense for the strange collection of figurines and memorabilia that litter the store (more pictures here).

After leaving, we joked about the possible origins of the store. How does one ever decide to create a store with such random stuff in it? How would you explain this store to someone who has never visited it? I’m sure I’m not doing it justice. How do you explain the weird nexus of genres sold? Part of what made the place so interesting to me, besides the strangeness of the environment, is how unique the Charlie Brown Farms is in the organizational world. Yes, it probably fits in a particular category/industry, but what makes CBF survive is that it has generated a unique position in the industry landscape that makes it instantly recognizable and memorable to visitors. In the words of strategy scholarship, it has an inimitable competitive advantage that has allowed it to secure a market niche. But is this all we as organizational scholars have to say about exceptional organizations like this? We need a good theory of organizational heterogeneity not only to describe the outliers like CBF, as the resource-based view does, but also to explain their origins. With a few exceptions (e.g., resource partitioning theory), this kind of explanation seems strangely missing from much of our theorizing.