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以實質選擇權觀點探討探索性與利用性活動對公司績效之影響：中介效果模型
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measuring these effects has been a challenging issue. We sought to meet this challenge by
employing a novel lag-structure methodology to better capture the lag effects of exploration
on firm performance.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The first section briefly reviews the
literature on the relationship between exploration and exploitation. The second section uses
real options reasoning to reconceptualize the exploration-exploitation issue and proposes
hypothesis based on this reasoning. The third section describes the test sample, research
model and the measures used to test the hypotheses. In the fourth section we present the
study results, suggest directions for future research and offer our conclusions.
2. Theory and Hypotheses
2.1 The Relationship between Exploration and Exploitation
Prior research modeled exploration and exploitation in different ways and proposed
different perspectives for balancing these two activities. Some scholars modeled exploration
and exploitation as orthogonal activities and advocated ambidexterity (Benner and Tushman,
2003) —pursuing exploration and exploitation simultaneously— as a way to strike a balance
between exploration and exploitation (Tushman and OʼReilly, 1996). Others, however,
recognized the difficulties in managing both at the same time and proposed an alternative-
attention approach, such as crowd-out (Benner and Tushman, 2002) or positive feedback
(Vermeulen and Barkema, 2001), as a better way to balance exploration and exploitation.
This perspective assumes that exploration and exploitation are the two ends of a continuum.
According to Gupta et al. (2006), there are four reasons for this controversy: (1) the
definitions and connotations for exploration and exploitation are unclear, (2) the nature of
these two activities involves orthogonality versus continuity, (3) ambidexterity versus
punctuated equilibrium perspectives, and (4) duality versus specialization. Three types of
relationships exist between exploration and exploitation. These relationships can be
categorized as: (a) a crowd-out relationship, (b) an alternative reducing approach, and (c) an
alternative enhancing approach in terms of the study period and resource scarcity for
synthesizing prior research. These alternatives are presented schematically in Table 1.