Causation, counterfactuals, and competitive advantage

Causation, Counterfactuals, and Competitive Advantage†

Causation is still poorly understood in strategy research, and confusion prevails around key concepts such as competitive advantage. In this paper, we define epistemological conditions that help dispel some of this confusion and provide a basis for more developed approaches. In particular, we argue that a counterfactual approach—one that builds on a systematic analysis of ‘what-if’ questions—ca...

Causation, Action and Counterfactuals

The central aim of many empirical studies in the physical, behavioral, social, and biological sciences is the elucidation of cause-effect relationships among variables. It is through causeeffect relationships that we obtain a sense of a "deep understanding" of a given phenomenon, and it is through such relationships that we obtain a sense of being "in control," namely, that we are able to shape...

Counterfactuals and Causation: History, Problems, and Prospects

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of thi...

Counterfactuals and Causation: Preferences on Belief Sets

A modal language called hypothetical logic is presented in which the semantics of counterfactuals is captured by a new syntactic version of belief updating that incorporates reason maintenance; the latter is claimed necessary for a theory of counterfactuals. The logic is then applied to problems in causation. Unlike other systems for information change, events and time in this framework are rep...

John Collins Counterfactuals , Causation , and Preemption