What are the specific statistical estimates behind Barnett & McKendrick (2004)'s hard-disk-drive Red Queen finding?

claim-barnett-mckendrick-2004-tested-red-queen-on-disk-drive-makers rests on the directional finding recovered from the paper's abstract — large firms led the technology race but failed to become stronger competitors than small rivals — but carries [unverified-quant]: no coefficients, hazard ratios, sample size, or years-of-data were recovered, and the full paper was never opened.

Why it matters. The claim-note is a technical-mechanism/empirical-finding claim resting on a Tier 1 abstract. The abstract gives the direction but not the magnitude or the model specification. Quantitative claims require a Tier 1–2 primary carrying the actual numbers; until the full paper is read, the note's directional finding is sound but its statistical spine is a gap, not a fact.

What would answer it.

• Read William P. Barnett & David G. McKendrick, "Why Are Some Organizations More Competitive than Others? Evidence from a Changing Global Market," Administrative Science Quarterly 49(4):535–571 (2004), in full.
• Recover the competitive-strength / failure-hazard model specification, the key coefficients and their signs, the sample size, and the years of disk-drive-industry data covered.
• Confirm whether the model estimates an exit/failure hazard in the Red Queen form (rivals raising each other's failure rates) or a different competitive- strength measure, and how "led the technology race yet failed to develop" is operationalized.

Candidate richer primary. David G. McKendrick separately authored From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry (Stanford University Press) — plausibly a fuller treatment of the same dataset.

Related: claim-barnett-book-text-asserts-disk-drive-industry-drives-up-failure-rates, claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition, entity-william-barnett, entity-david-mckendrick.

Progress log

2026-07-29. A dedicated verification session attempted direct fetches against every located route to the paper and came up empty. Recorded here so a future session doesn't repeat the same five dead ends: SAGE (publisher of record, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/4131490) — HTTP 403; JSTOR (jstor.org/stable/4131490) — HTTP 403; ResearchGate paper page — HTTP 403; Durham Research Online / Worktribe (both the abstract page durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1631157 and the direct PDF durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1631176/2516.pdf) — HTTP 403; an r.jina.ai reader-proxy retry on the Durham PDF — HTTP 401. No coefficients, hazard ratios, model specification, sample size, or years-of-data were recovered. The question stays open and unresolved.

One new lead worth a retry before the others: Semantic Scholar's own bibliographic record (queried by DOI via the Graph API) lists an openAccessPdf pointing at the same Durham repository URL under a CC-BY license — metadata says this copy should be open, but the repository itself 403'd every route tried this session (HTML page, direct PDF, and a proxy). Possibly session-specific rate-limiting rather than the content actually being gated; worth a fresh attempt, ideally from a different session/IP, before concluding the CC-BY claim is wrong.

Two further candidate primaries, still unopened: Carroll, McKendrick, Harrison, Teo & Barnett, "Differentiation, Variation and Selection: Evolutionary Implications of Technical Change among the Worldwide Population of Hard Disk Drive Makers, 1965–1998," Stanford GSB Research Paper 1915 (2004) — a related hard-disk-drive population study, possibly overlapping data, located only via WebSearch aggregation, not fetched; and David G. McKendrick, "Global strategy and population-level learning: the case of hard disk drives," Strategic Management Journal 22(4):307–334 (2001) — Wiley-paywalled, not accessed.