organizational forgetting

The formal model (Argote, Beckman & Epple 1990: experience depreciates by a constant factor δ each period, E_t = δE_{t-1} + q_{t-1}) that treats accumulated production knowledge as something an organization can lose, not just accumulate. It is the mechanism by which the vault's standard learning curve can run backwards — costs rising when production slows — and the rate at which forgetting happens turns out to vary sharply by industry: much slower in Benkard's aircraft-manufacturing case than in the ship-production and franchise settings the specification was first tested on. There is an unexplored, uncausal echo of the same shape in neural-network forgetting curves.

This is the econometric branch of "organizational forgetting" specifically — a 2026-07-26 capture found the label is overloaded in the wider literature, and that a separate interpretive branch (entity-collective-forgetting-interpretive, descended from Halbwachs rather than production economics) shares the name but not the mechanism, and the two rarely cite each other.

References

• claim-organizational-forgetting-can-reverse-the-learning-curve · claim-benkard-2000-estimate-implies-far-less-forgetting-than-prior-studies · claim-benkard-2000-headline-depreciation-figure-is-the-spillover-adjusted-specification

• claim-organizational-forgetting-names-two-unrelated-research-traditions (disambiguation from the interpretive branch)

• claim-david-brachet-2011-splits-forgetting-into-continuous-and-discrete-channels · claim-david-brachet-2011-turnover-channel-twice-skill-decay-channel (a second, independent decomposition of the econometric branch, on a paramedic-workforce dataset)

• Related hubs: entity-c-lanier-benkard · entity-linda-argote · entity-lockheed-l-1011-tristar · entity-collective-forgetting-interpretive · entity-jingle-fallacy

• Captures: 2026-07-11-hop-learning-curve-unidentified, 2026-07-24-does-benkard-2000-report-the-organizational-forgetting-depreciation, 2026-07-26-hop-forgetting-has-two-lineages, 2026-08-11-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different

• 2026-08-11: A second econometric decomposition (David & Brachet 2011, on Mississippi paramedic/ambulance-company data, independent of the Argote/Benkard/Lockheed line already on this page) splits organizational forgetting into a continuous skill-decay channel and a discrete turnover-loss channel — and structurally, without either citing the other, parallels ML's catastrophic-vs-graceful forgetting split. See claim-david-brachet-2011-splits-forgetting-into-continuous-and-discrete-channels.

• 2026-08-12: A direct, complete-enumeration bibliometric check (David & Brachet's 26-entry reference list, and the 60 papers Semantic Scholar indexes as citing it) found zero contact with the ML catastrophic-forgetting literature in either direction — the strongest evidence yet that this econometric branch and the neural-network literature share no citation lineage, though confirmed for only this one founding pair. See claim-david-brachet-2011-reference-list-contains-zero-ml-citations and claim-david-brachet-2011-citing-papers-contain-zero-ml-work.