"Selection at the Gate: Difficult Cases, Spillovers, and Organizational Learning"


Speaker


Abstract

We examine longitudinal data on British fertility clinics to examine the impact of “selection at the gate”, i.e. the attempts of organizations to improve the success rate of their output by means of selecting promising cases as input. Contrary to common wisdom, we argue that more stringent input selection is likely to decrease an organization’s overt performance, because firms that do admit difficult cases develop steeper learning curves. That is, the difficult cases help them learn more from prior experience. In line with these predictions, our results provide clear evidence that organizations that deal with fewer difficult cases in their portfolio consequently begin to display worse overall performance figures
 
Contact information:
Carolien Heintjes
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