发表机构
Esade Business School; Said Business School, Oxford（埃萨德商学院; 牛津赛德商学院）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
本研究提出社会模仿机制，通过社区集体提炼和传播策略，扩展组织搜索范围，并发现其价值依赖于情境化评估，且能提升群体绩效。
AI 中文摘要
生成式人工智能揭示了一个更广泛的组织难题：资源受限的年轻企业可以依托更广泛领域内产生的知识，来解决超出其内部经验的问题。我们将一种机制理论化为社会模仿：这是一个分布式且递归的过程，社区通过观察各组织的实践和结果，提炼出可迁移的策略，传播这些策略，并根据采纳产生的新证据修订集体知识库。这一视角将模仿对象内生化。组织不仅仅是复制实践；社区集体生产出可供复制的内容。我们区分了候选策略的来源（直接观察的组织或集体）与其采纳模式（盲目或知情），并在一个组织搜索的基于代理的模型中考察了四种模仿形式。仅靠集体来源并不能提高绩效。其价值取决于情境化评估：评估候选策略是否适合采纳者的配置。随着相互依赖性的增加，知情的社会模仿能提高群体绩效和发现的最佳解决方案。随着问题变得复杂，它比从一两个直接观察的同行那里进行知情模仿更有可能表现更优，因为集体提炼维持了更广泛的候选策略库。大部分收益来自评估一个小型候选集，且当只有少数组织具备评估能力时，群体绩效也能提高。因此，社会模仿揭示了一种认知劳动分工：社区扩展了组织可以考虑的策略，而组织通过确定哪些策略合适来创造价值。它解释了企业如何调动其边界之外的知识，以及为什么广泛获取集体知识并不会产生同等的收益。
英文摘要
Generative artificial intelligence illustrates a broader organizational puzzle: young, resource-constrained firms can build on knowledge produced across a wider field to address problems that exceed their internal experience. We theorize one mechanism as social imitation: a distributed and recursive process through which communities observe practices and outcomes across organizations, distill recurrent elements into portable strategies, circulate them, and revise the collective repertoire as adoption produces new evidence. This perspective endogenizes the object of imitation. Organizations do not merely copy practices; communities collectively produce what becomes available to copy. We distinguish the source of a candidate (directly observed organizations or a collective) from its mode of adoption (blind or informed), and examine four forms of imitation in an agent-based model of organizational search. Collective sourcing alone does not improve performance. Its value depends on situated evaluation: assessing whether a candidate fits the adopter's configuration. As interdependence increases, informed social imitation improves population performance and the best solution discovered. As problems grow, it becomes more likely to outperform informed imitation from one or several directly observed peers because collective distillation sustains a broader candidate repertoire. Most gains arise from evaluating a small candidate set, and population performance can improve when only a minority of organizations possesses evaluative capability. Social imitation thus reveals a division of cognitive labor: communities expand the strategies organizations can consider, while organizations create value by determining which strategies fit. It explains how firms can mobilize knowledge beyond their boundaries, and why widespread access to collective knowledge does not produce equal benefits.
