Competitive Escalation
In this paper, the authors describe a set of studies investigating factors that might reduce the tendency to engage in competitive escalation. The particular setting in which this is studied is a dollar auction. They find that direct experience with the dollar auction reduces competitive escalation in a subsequent auction. A different type of auction does not have the same effect. Managerial experience does not completely remove the effect either. Even goal setting fails to provide an adequate prophylactic.
I found this paper to be very intriguing. The topic is clearly important, because competitive escalation can drive people and organizations to take miserably suboptimal actions. Finding ways of helping people avoid these actions is a …show more content…
laudable goal. To this point, the paper raises interesting conceptual issues, such as the role of the hot-cold empathy gap in competitive escalation. The paper also contains some intriguing studies. Aside from very low sample sizes, which I discuss later, the methods of the studies seem appropriate.
Despite these positive features of the paper, I feel as though I’m somewhat far away from recommending publication. I have many concerns about the current version of the paper. Below I mention my concerns. Perhaps there is a way for the authors to rework the paper to alleviate these concerns. However, my concerns are many and run deep, so I’m not necessarily optimistic as to how a revision process would go. I’d also like to see at least one major study with better sample sizes.
I’m having some difficulty determining what conclusions from this paper would be novel contributions in this area. My research expertise is not directly relevant this area, and this may be part of why I’m struggling with this point. However, the novelty of the contributions of this paper should be made more explicit and obvious, even for a general reader. The introduction seemed to suggest that the authors were making conceptual headway in their articulation of competitive escalation, but I still had a lot of uncertainty about novelty. How much of what the authors were describing has already been discussed in related papers? One example is Hypothesis 1 on page 9. Don’t we know the answer to that issue already? More generally, all the contents of Page 9 (including footnote 4) were hard to follow, in terms of what’s really new and what is already established. Page 9 is very important, but I was left feeling too uncertain after reading it. Another example is when the authors say “We add competition to the list of visceral hot states...” (page 28). Do the authors mean to characterize this as an important, novel contribution of this paper? I feel like competition has been mentioned as a hot state before, but perhaps I’m wrong (see also below about other concerns regarding the specificity of the evidence for this claim).
The paper contains a very interesting discussion of how arousal in the hot-cold empty gap may factor into competitive escalation.
However, the claims that the paper makes about establishing a role for the hot-cold empathy gap go beyond what the empirical results can support. The authors point to the fact that goal setting did not substantially reduce bids in the dollar auction as supportive of a role for the hot-cold empathy gap. I agree that this is consistent with the idea that arousal or emotion played a role in fueling the escalation of bids. However, I don’t think that this is directly supportive evidence. There are other reasons why goal setting may have failed. Perhaps the most direct evidence that the authors point to are quotes from participants’ comments that were collected at the end of the studies. The comments that the authors quoted are very specific to the role of arousal and stress. Unfortunately, the paper provides no indication of how these comments were solicited, whether they were analyzed quantitatively, and what the results of those quantitative analyses look like. As much as I like the speculation about the hot-cold empathy gap and the role of arousal, if this paper is really going to make a strong contribution about this point, the empirical work needs to be more specifically tied to that …show more content…
idea.
The empirical work suffers from very low sample sizes.
Nothing was said about power analyses. To detect a medium-sized effect in a 2-cell, between-subjects design at 80% power, a researcher needs 128 participants (64 per cell). Perhaps the authors assume that the effect sizes in their studies would be massive, which could justify having lower sample sizes. However, it is striking just how low the sample sizes are. Because groups are the appropriate units of analysis, the functional sample size in Study 1 is 14. That is, there were 14 groups being tested. With an N of 14, drawing conclusions from inferential statistics becomes challenging, especially in the case of nonsignificant differences. Experiment 1B, which involved managers, included only 28 participants divided into seven groups. The evidence that the managers overbid and exhibited competitive escalation is pretty clear, but the authors then compared the results of that study to results from a part of Experiment 1a. Because the difference was nonsignificant, the authors concluded that “managerial experience is not sufficient to avert destructive consequences in a new competitive escalation situation.” From this comparison, it’s not appropriate to conclude that managerial experience doesn’t matter or wouldn’t matter for reducing the extent of competitive escalation. There are just too few participants to draw any meaningful conclus about how small the effect of managerial experience generally
is.
Also unsettling is how often the paper reports comparisons across studies rather than within conditions of an experiment. There are so many factors that can change across two studies that one needs to be very careful in making these sorts of comparisons.
Finally, the writing in this paper needs significant improvement. First, this paper is far longer than it should be. The introduction was too long; the description of the first experiment started on page 16. There must be various elements that can be cut. For example, I don’t think an entire page should be devoted to why the paradigm was minimal (page 15). Second, the organization of the paper could be improved to make it more reader friendly. The first five pages are essentially a mini introduction before the full introduction really begins. I’d recommend combining those into one, reasonably sized introduction. Third, there were numerous sentences that were long and confusing. One example is at the bottom of page 13, where a sentence starts with “prompting participants to engage…” I think the authors should reread the paper and look for these long sentences. Fourth, when describing the results, the authors seemed somewhat inconsistent about what metrics were discussed and in what order.
I found this paper to be very intriguing. The topic is clearly important, because competitive escalation can drive people and organizations to take miserably suboptimal actions. Finding ways of helping people avoid these actions is a …show more content…
laudable goal. To this point, the paper raises interesting conceptual issues, such as the role of the hot-cold empathy gap in competitive escalation. The paper also contains some intriguing studies. Aside from very low sample sizes, which I discuss later, the methods of the studies seem appropriate.
Despite these positive features of the paper, I feel as though I’m somewhat far away from recommending publication. I have many concerns about the current version of the paper. Below I mention my concerns. Perhaps there is a way for the authors to rework the paper to alleviate these concerns. However, my concerns are many and run deep, so I’m not necessarily optimistic as to how a revision process would go. I’d also like to see at least one major study with better sample sizes.
I’m having some difficulty determining what conclusions from this paper would be novel contributions in this area. My research expertise is not directly relevant this area, and this may be part of why I’m struggling with this point. However, the novelty of the contributions of this paper should be made more explicit and obvious, even for a general reader. The introduction seemed to suggest that the authors were making conceptual headway in their articulation of competitive escalation, but I still had a lot of uncertainty about novelty. How much of what the authors were describing has already been discussed in related papers? One example is Hypothesis 1 on page 9. Don’t we know the answer to that issue already? More generally, all the contents of Page 9 (including footnote 4) were hard to follow, in terms of what’s really new and what is already established. Page 9 is very important, but I was left feeling too uncertain after reading it. Another example is when the authors say “We add competition to the list of visceral hot states...” (page 28). Do the authors mean to characterize this as an important, novel contribution of this paper? I feel like competition has been mentioned as a hot state before, but perhaps I’m wrong (see also below about other concerns regarding the specificity of the evidence for this claim).
The paper contains a very interesting discussion of how arousal in the hot-cold empty gap may factor into competitive escalation.
However, the claims that the paper makes about establishing a role for the hot-cold empathy gap go beyond what the empirical results can support. The authors point to the fact that goal setting did not substantially reduce bids in the dollar auction as supportive of a role for the hot-cold empathy gap. I agree that this is consistent with the idea that arousal or emotion played a role in fueling the escalation of bids. However, I don’t think that this is directly supportive evidence. There are other reasons why goal setting may have failed. Perhaps the most direct evidence that the authors point to are quotes from participants’ comments that were collected at the end of the studies. The comments that the authors quoted are very specific to the role of arousal and stress. Unfortunately, the paper provides no indication of how these comments were solicited, whether they were analyzed quantitatively, and what the results of those quantitative analyses look like. As much as I like the speculation about the hot-cold empathy gap and the role of arousal, if this paper is really going to make a strong contribution about this point, the empirical work needs to be more specifically tied to that …show more content…
idea.
The empirical work suffers from very low sample sizes.
Nothing was said about power analyses. To detect a medium-sized effect in a 2-cell, between-subjects design at 80% power, a researcher needs 128 participants (64 per cell). Perhaps the authors assume that the effect sizes in their studies would be massive, which could justify having lower sample sizes. However, it is striking just how low the sample sizes are. Because groups are the appropriate units of analysis, the functional sample size in Study 1 is 14. That is, there were 14 groups being tested. With an N of 14, drawing conclusions from inferential statistics becomes challenging, especially in the case of nonsignificant differences. Experiment 1B, which involved managers, included only 28 participants divided into seven groups. The evidence that the managers overbid and exhibited competitive escalation is pretty clear, but the authors then compared the results of that study to results from a part of Experiment 1a. Because the difference was nonsignificant, the authors concluded that “managerial experience is not sufficient to avert destructive consequences in a new competitive escalation situation.” From this comparison, it’s not appropriate to conclude that managerial experience doesn’t matter or wouldn’t matter for reducing the extent of competitive escalation. There are just too few participants to draw any meaningful conclus about how small the effect of managerial experience generally
is.
Also unsettling is how often the paper reports comparisons across studies rather than within conditions of an experiment. There are so many factors that can change across two studies that one needs to be very careful in making these sorts of comparisons.
Finally, the writing in this paper needs significant improvement. First, this paper is far longer than it should be. The introduction was too long; the description of the first experiment started on page 16. There must be various elements that can be cut. For example, I don’t think an entire page should be devoted to why the paradigm was minimal (page 15). Second, the organization of the paper could be improved to make it more reader friendly. The first five pages are essentially a mini introduction before the full introduction really begins. I’d recommend combining those into one, reasonably sized introduction. Third, there were numerous sentences that were long and confusing. One example is at the bottom of page 13, where a sentence starts with “prompting participants to engage…” I think the authors should reread the paper and look for these long sentences. Fourth, when describing the results, the authors seemed somewhat inconsistent about what metrics were discussed and in what order.