Learning from My Success and from Others' Failure: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery

Abstract

Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. Although empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in organizational learning, to date, the phenomenon has received little attention at the individual level. Drawing on attribution theory in psychology, we investigate how individuals learn from their own past experiences with both failure and success and from the experiences of others. For our empirical analyses, we use 10 years of data from 71 cardiothoracic surgeons who completed more than 6,500 procedures using a new technology for cardiac surgery. We find that individuals learn more from their own successes than from their own failures, but they learn more from the failures of others than from others' successes. We also find that individuals' prior successes and others' failures can help individuals overcome their inability to learn from their own failures. Together, these findings offer both theoretical and practical insights into how individuals learn directly from their prior experience and indirectly from the experiences of others. AcknowledgmentsWe thank Mike Luca, Ella Miron-Spektor, Lamar Pierce, and Enno Siemsen for valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper. We are grateful to Jesper Sørensen, the associate editor, and to the referees who provided constructive and developmental assistance throughout the review process. All errors remain our own.-1 - Learning from My Success and From Others' Failure:Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery AbstractLearning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. While empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in organizational learning, to date the phenomenon has received little attention at the individual level. Drawing on attribution theory in psychology, we investigate how individuals learn from their own past experiences with both failure and success and from the experiences of others. For our empirical analyses, we use ten years of data from 71 cardiothoracic surgeons who completed over 6,500 procedures using a new technology for cardiac surgery. We find that individuals learn more from their own successes than from their own failures but learn more from the failures of others than from others' successes. We also find that individuals' prior successes and others' failures can help individuals overcome their inability to learn from their own failures. Together, these findings offer both theoretical and practical insights into how individuals learn directly from their prior experience and indirectly from the experiences of others.

Blinded by Experience: Prior Experience, Negative News and Belief Updating

“…Individuals may perform better when surrounded by others with whom they've worked (Huckman et al 2009;Huckman and Staats 2011) or alter the effort they allocate depending on their coworkers' actions (Schultz, Schoenherr and Nembhard 2010;Chan, Li and Pierce 2014). In examining others' experience, prior work has tended to focus on what one can learn from this outside or vicarious experience (Gino et al 2010;KC et al 2013). As is the case with individual experience, we find that others' experiences may also prove maladaptive when negative news is shared.…”

“…Our definition of a peer of physician p is any cardiologist who performed an angioplasty at the same hospital where physician p operates on patients. A similar definition of others' experience has been used by related work in the literature (KC and Staats 2012;KC et al 2013). As such, we construct a variable for the experience of the peers of any given physician as follows: ∈ In the specification above H(p) denotes the set of hospitals where physician p treats patients.…”

“…When others have experience with an operational decision then a focal individual can benefit from her knowledge to understand any negative news that occurs. The idea of learning from others is well established in the literature on learning in organizations (Reagans, Argote and Brooks 2005;KC et al 2013). Although others' experience provides a reservoir of knowledge as in the prior section, that knowledge could lead to more or less of a change in the use of a production technology, as compared to individuals without such access, depending on the contextual details.…”

“…Research in this tradition can be seen in the examination of product recalls (Thirumalai and Sinha 2011;Shah et al 2013), supply chain disruptions (Hendricks and Singhal 2005;Schmidt and Raman 2015), or operational failures (Haunschild and Rhee 2004;KC et al 2013). In this paper, we consider how individuals update their beliefs in response to negative news.…”

“…Prior research in the domains of consumer choice (Cutler, Huckman and Landrum 2004;Sinaceur, Heath and Cole 2005;Zhao, Zhao and Helsen 2011), psychology (Camerer and Lovallo 1999;Yaniv 2004;Bonaccio and Dalal 2006), and operations management (Thirumalai and Sinha 2011;KC, Staats and Gino 2013;Shah, Ball and Netessine 2013) have explored how new information influences people's subsequent choices and outcomes. For example, Simonsohn (2011) finds that consumers not only respond to reviews when purchasing child car seats, but also update their beliefs and purchasing decisions when the information in the reviews is corrected following a mistake made by the reviewing organization.…”