Pyramiding: Efficient search for rare subjects
Name
von Hippel_Pyramiding.PDF
Size
590.46 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
b16da0ca97524bfe71596ef0a370f16f
Author(s)
von Hippel, Eric A.
Franke, Nikolaus
Prugl, Reinhard
Date Issued
September 2009
Journal
Research Policy
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
von Hippel, Eric, Nikolaus Franke, and Reinhard Prugl. “Pyramiding: Efficient search for rare subjects.” Research Policy 38.9 (2009): 1397-1406.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
The need to economically identify rare subjects within large, poorly mapped search spaces is a frequently encountered problem for social scientists and managers. It is notoriously difficult, for example, to identify “the best new CEO for our company,” or the “best three lead users to participate in our product development project.” Mass screening of entire populations or samples becomes steadily more expensive as the number of acceptable solutions within the search space becomes rarer.
The search strategy of “pyramiding” is a potential solution to this problem under many conditions. Pyramiding is a search process based upon the idea that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. In this paper we report upon four experiments empirically exploring the efficiency of pyramiding searches relative to mass screening. We find that pyramiding on average identified the most expert individual in a group on a specific topic with only 28.4% of the group interviewed – a great efficiency gain relative to mass screening. Further, pyramiding identified one of the top 3 experts in a population after interviewing only 15.9% of the group on average. We discuss conditions under which the pyramiding search method is likely to be efficient relative to screening.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2009.07.005
