Created Mon, Dec 28, 2015 § Last Modified Mon, Dec 28, 2015
Abstract: Initial thoughts on rivalry as a distinct sociological construct. I wrote much of the following in Spring 2011.
Introduction Uzzi (1996) makes the embeddedness hypothesis (Granovetter 1985) actionable; his results suggest that the degree to which a firm concentrates its exchange in few or many partners, and the degree to which a firm’s partners do the same, matter to a focal firm’s survival. Whereas the survival returns to ‘first-order’ embedded ties increase monotonically, the relation between partners’ network characteristics and the focal firm’s survival is curvilinear (U-shaped).