Helge Klapper

Across 143 acquisitions involving 298 open-source projects, protection-motivated acquisitions were associated with intensified collaboration with a target's partners, while extraction-motivated acquisitions were associated with diminished collaboration.

What role do collaborations with a target's partners play in an acquisition, and how do these collaborations evolve post-acquisition? Research suggests that these collaborations are an important reason to acquire but often diminish post-acquisition. But if they tend to diminish, why are they a reason to acquire? Our analysis of acquirers' motives of 143 acquisitions of firms that collaborate with partners on 298 open-source projects resolves the outlined puzzle and reveals two types of acquisition motives: protection-motivated acquisitions, where acquirers focus on protecting the complementarity with the technology and the partners, and extraction-motivated acquisitions, where acquirers focus on extracting technology and employees. We find that protection-motivated acquisitions are associated with an intensification of collaborations, meanwhile extraction-motivated acquisitions are associated with a diminishment of the collaboration. We contribute to research on acquisitions, collaboration, and OSS.

An agent-based model examines how group network structure shapes informational and normative influence, and when deliberation can help a group outperform its best member.

Organizations often rely on deliberative groups (committees, taskforces, boards) to make decisions, yet deliberation's effectiveness remains contested. When can deliberation help a group outperform the average or even the best individual in the group? We propose that the value of deliberation depends on how the network structure of the group shapes informational influence (which promotes updating beliefs based on perceived expertise) and normative influence (which drives conformity to gain social approval). Using an agent-based model, we show that deliberation can help groups achieve strong synergy effects (i.e. outperform the best individual in the group) if members typically recognize each other's relative expertise at better than chance levels, and when the network structure neither isolates any members nor allows for clustering and cliques. Moreover, introducing a few actors into the network who are impervious to conformity (such as AI agents) can improve group decision quality even if these actors are no better than random chance at recognizing expertise. We draw implications for how to compose and structure group deliberation processes to improve the chances of obtaining effective decisions.

Using Wikipedia peer evaluations and interviews, we examine how members about to be evaluated adjust their evaluations strategically, participating in more evaluations while carefully targeting which ones they join.

Peer evaluations place organizational members in a dual role: they evaluate their peers and are being evaluated by their peers. We theorize that when evaluating their peers, they anticipate how their evaluations will be perceived and adjust their evaluations strategically to be evaluated more positively themselves when their peers assess them. Building on this overarching claim of role duality resulting in strategic peer evaluations, we focus on a dilemma that evaluating members face: they want to leverage their evaluations of peers to portray themselves as engaged and having high standards, but at the same time, they must be careful not to offend anyone as doing so may cause retaliation. We suggest that organizational members about to be evaluated resolve this dilemma by participating in more peer evaluations but carefully targeting which evaluations they participate in. We test our theory by analyzing peer evaluations on Wikipedia, supplemented by in-depth semistructured interviews. Our study informs research on peer evaluation and organizational design by revealing how being an evaluator and evaluated can make evaluations more strategic.

In four laboratory studies with 444 participants, managerial monitoring increased search distance and duration; similar interventions from peers and subordinates were ineffective.

In this article, we explore the effects of managerial monitoring on the behavior of subordinates tasked with the search for alternatives in a complex environment. We argue that managerial monitoring will lead subordinates to exhibit more search than they would engage in otherwise as they try to impress their superiors by exerting more effort. We test and confirm our hypothesis in four laboratory studies with a total of 444 participants. Our findings show that search distance and duration are highly susceptible to managerial monitoring, whereas similar interventions from peers and subordinates are ineffective.