---
title: "What are the specific statistical estimates behind Barnett & McKendrick (2004)'s hard-disk-drive Red Queen finding?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["organizational-theory","red-queen","william-barnett","hard-disk-drive-industry","verification","quant"]
---


[[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.