Prof. Audia’s research consists of two streams of work dealing with issues regarding how organizations and organizational populations evolve. A first body of work, which is more micro or psychological in nature, focuses on how organizational members interpret and respond to environmental demands reflected in performance feedback and a second body of work, which is more macro or sociological in nature, focuses on how local environmental conditions influence organizational creation and survival.
In his early work on how decision makers respond to performance feedback, Prof. Audia examined how processes of overconfidence and threat-rigidity help to explain dysfunctional persistence, risk aversion, and creativity. More recently, guided by the recognition that it is not objective performance that influences decision making but rather how performance is interpreted, Prof. Audia has turned his attention to the process of performance assessment. In his recent research, Prof. Audia suggests that decision makers assess performance in different ways depending on whether they are motivated to solve problems or whether they are motivated to maintain a positive image of themselves. Prof. Audia does not see these motives as fixed states but rather as propensities that are elevated or suppressed by individual characteristics and situational features. The result is a view of performance assessment which gives decision makers considerably more leeway in the way they interpret performance than we see in conventional decision making models. In a recent development Prof. Audia has extended his work on subjective assessment of performance to the realm of social networks. By studying the process of ties reciprocation, Prof. Audia seeks to uncover factors that influence the extent to which individuals form inaccurate views of their social networks.
His macro research examines how organizational populations interact and influence each other and shows that these organizational dynamics are conditioned by geographical proximity and the degree to which organizational populations are connected to each other. This community ecology approach allows Prof. Audia to explore why some geographical communities are sites for the emergence of new organizational populations. Virtually all the literature on geographic location, including that in economics and geography, tends to view the emergence of an organizational population as either unaddressed or assumed to be random. Instead of addressing the factors underpinning the location of the first firm, this work generally focuses on why concentrations of producers increase or decrease, given that they are already present. The community ecology approach adopted by Prof. Audia allows tackling this vexing issue through consideration of inter-population relations. Another key development pursued by Prof. Audia in this line of inquiry is the movement from a focus on processes internal to geographic communities to a focus on processes linking geographic communities in market space. To study inter-community relations, Prof. Audia integrates insights and methods from the theory of organizational ecology and the theory of social networks.