* Academy of Management Review

2001. Vol. 26. No. 2, 243-263.

CAUSATION AND EFFECTUATION: TOWARD

A THEORETICAL SHIFT FROM
ECONOMIC INEVITABILITY TO
ENTREPRENEURIAL CONTINGENCY
SARAS D. SARASVATHY
University of Washington
In economics and management theories, scholars have traditionally assumed the
existence of artifacts such as firms/organizations and markets. I argue that an explanation for the creation of such artifacts requires the notion of effectuation. Causation
rests on a logic of prediction, effectuation on the logic of control. I illustrate effectuation through business examples and realistic thought experiments, examine its
connections with existing theories and empirical evidence, and offer a list oi testable
propositions for future empirical work.
; ;
,

I now am eagerly striving, for example, to get

this truth which J seem half to perceive, into
words which shall make it show more clearly. If
the words come, it will seem as if the striving
itself had drawn or pulled them into actuality out
from the state of merely possible being in which
they were. How is this feat performed? How does
the pulling pull? How do J get my hold on words
not yet existent and when they come by what
means have I made them come? Really it is the
problem of creation; for in the end the question is:
How do J make them be?...
. . . Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying
with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally
achieving our intentionthis is action, this is
effectuation in the only shape in which, by a pure
experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it
anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in
its first intention, here is causality at work
Games, 1912: 181, 183).

values is the set of values in terms of which he

wants to act? (March, 1982: 74).
Walk into an MBA classroom anywhere in the
world. Chances are the discussion revolves
around a decision or a set of decisions to be
made. For example, classes with a more economic bent (e.g., managerial economics, marketing, strategy) might be discussing the pricing
decision. The standard formal approach to this
decision involves setting the marginal revenue
equal to the marginal cost; a more adaptive
approach might involve doing market research
to discover the shape of the demand function
and to arrive at a price that the market will bear.
In another example, classes with a more psychological bent (e.g., human resources management, organization behavior, leadership) might
be discussing personnel decisions, such as hiring the best person for the job or managing
and/or leading a team. Approaches might range
from psychometric measurements to avoiding
well-understood biases, such as anchoring, escalation, groupthink, and so on.
These decisions in economics and management may be discussed at several levels: individual, firm, industry/market, and economy. But
underlying almost every one of these decisions
is the assumed existence of the central artifacts
and contexts of business within which the decisions take place. In other words, none of these
decisions involves the creation of artifacts such
as firms, markets, and economies. For example,
the following are rarely, if at all, addressed in
our curricula:

We know how to advise a society, an organization, or an individual if we are first given a consistent set of preferences. Under some conditions,
we can suggest how to make decisions if the
preferences are only consistent up to the point of
specifying a series of independent constraints on
the choice. But what about a normative theory of
goal-finding behavior? What do we say when our
client tells us that he is not sure his present set of

I thank the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for funding the empirical work that led to the development of the
ideas in this article. I also thank Herb Simon, Anil Menon,
and Lester Lave for their invaluable conversation, and the
anonymous AMR reviewers, Edward Conlon, Marilyn Gist,
Tom Jones, Tom Lee, Benyamin Lichtenstein, Scott Shane,
S. Venkataraman, and Andy Wicks for commenting on earlier versions of this paper and for helping me improve it.
243

244

Academy of Management Review

How do we make the pricing decision when

the firm does not yet exist (i.e., no revenue
functions or cost functions are given) or,
even more interesting, when the market for
the product/service does not yet exist (i.e.,
there is no demand function)?
How do we hire someone for an organization
that does not yet exist? How do we even get
able people to apply to a contingent organizationan organization whose existence is
contingent upon acquiring employees (e.g.,
a knowledge-intensive firm, such as a software company)?!
How do we value firms in an industry that
did not exist five years ago and is barely
forming in the present (e.g., internet companies)? More interesting, how would we have
valued them five years ago, when internet
companies were barely emerging?
At the macro level, how do we create a capitalist economy from a formerly communist
one? Or, more interesting, what should a
posfcapifaiisf economy look like?'
A very large and growing fraction of people in
business struggle with such decisions every
day. Business all over the world is becoming
more free-market oriented and more entrepreneurial. Almost half the companies on the Fortune 500 list did not exist fifteen years ago.
Emerging technologies, such as those on the
internet, are not only creating rapid change but
also fundamentally redefining how we truck
and trade and how we interact with one another
in every sphere of human action. Therefore, as
March points out in the quote at the beginning of
this article, questions such as the ones listed
above ought to be an important part of our research endeavors.
Each of these questions involves the problem
of choosing particular effects that may or may
not implement intentional goals. For example, if
we knew precisely what type of firm we wished
to create, we could use existing theories and
principles to create the firm. But usually all the
entrepreneur knows when he or she starts out is
something very general, such as the desire to
make lots of money or to create a valuable legacy like a lasting institution, or, more common.
' All four questions listed here can be addressed through
a general theory of effectual reasoning, the main elements of
which are explicated in this article. However, given the
cognitive and spatial limits of a single journal article, I focus
on the first question alone. I address this question in considerable detail to illustrate (what is for now) a special
theory of effectuation in the creation of firms in nonexistent
or not-yet-existent markets.

April

to simply pursue an interesting idea that seems

worth pursuing. Similarly, if we clearly knew
which particular market to capture, we could
presumably use techniques of market research
and formulate strategies to penetrate it. In areas
such as e-commerce, however, most markets are
nascent or simply nonexistent. Marketing to
markets that do not yet exist involves understanding how markets come to be. Similarly,
valuing and financing a firm that does not yet
exist involve understanding how firms come to
be. And creating a firm in a market that does not
yet exist involves understanding how to make
decisions in the absence of preexistent goals.
March sets out three justifications that researchers have used to ignore phenomena involving ambiguous, changing, and constructed
goals and values:
The first is that goal development and choice are
independent processes, conceptually and behaviorally. The second is that the model of choice is
never satisfied in fact and that deviations from
the model accommodate the problems of introducing change. The third is that the idea of
changing goals is so intractable in a normative
theory of choice that nothing can be said about it.
Since I am unpersuaded on the first and second
justifications, my optimism with respect to the
third is somewhat greater than most of my fellows (March, 1982: 72).

In the past couple of decades, researchers

have been struggling in March's spirit of optimism to take on these seemingly intractable
questions. I hope to make a contribution here
toward that effort by identifying and developing
a decision model that involves processes of effectuation, rather than causation, and showing
its use in the creation of new firms. Although a
general theory of effectuation could be developed to address all four types of questions listed
above, in this article I develop only a special
theory to explain the creation of new firms.
After a brief definition of effectuation as contrasted with causation, I explicate the processes
involved through two thought experiments
one hypothetical and the other historicaland
then I succinctly review several relevant
streams of research in order to delineate the
space for effectuation processes in the literature
and to develop a rudimentary theory of effectuation. Thereafter, I suggest connections to the
seminal works of three eminent researchers in
management who have taken the lead toward
new horizons in our discipline (March, 1982;

2001

Sarasvathy

Mintzberg, 1994; Weick, 1979). Following that, I

examine some recent empirical evidence that
does not fit with the traditionally accepted paradigm of causation models and, finally, develop
propositions based on effectuation at all four
levels of phenomena: macro, industry/market,
firm, and individual.

*
:
:'

PROCESSES OF CAUSATION AND

EFFECTUATION

Definition; Causation^ processes take

a particular effect as given and focus
on selecting between means to create
that effect. Effectuation processes taice
a set of means as given and focus on
selecting between possible effects
that can be created with that set of
means.

A simple example should help clarify and distinguish between the two types of processes.
Imagine a chef assigned the task of cooking
dinner. There are two ways the task can be organized. In the first, the host or client picks out a
menu in advance. All the chef needs to do is list
the ingredients needed, shop for them, and then
actually cook the meal. This is a process of causation. It begins with a given menu and focuses
on selecting between effective ways to prepare
the meal.
In the second case, the host asks the chef to
look through the cupboards in the kitchen for
possible ingredients and utensils and then cook
a meal. Here, the chef has to imagine possible
menus based on the given ingredients and utensils, select the menu, and then prepare the meal.
This is a process of effectuation. It begins with
given ingredients and utensils and focuses on
preparing one of many possible desirable meals
with them.
A variety of such simple examples can be
imagined: a carpenter who is asked to build a
desk, versus one who is given a toolbox and
some wood and asked to build whatever he or
she chooses; an artist who is asked to paint a
portrait of a particular person, versus one who is
given a blank canvas and some paints and required to paint anything he or she chooses; and
^A brief outline of the philosophical underpinnings of
causation is provided in a later section, titled "Future Theoretical Work on Eifectuation."

245

SO on. These are obviously oversimplified examples. To bring the definitions closer to reality
through, say, the dinner example, we have to
add elements of dynamism and contingencies of
various kinds, including multiple interacting
chefs and hosts and dinner guests. But the point
here is that in each example the generaiized
end goal or aspiration remains the same both in
causation and effectuationthat is, to cook a
meal, to build some wooden artifact, or to create
a painting. In fact, an effect is the operationalization of an abstract human aspiration. The
distinguishing characteristic between causation and effectuation is in the set of choices:
choosing between means to create a particular
effect, versus choosing between many possible
effects using a particular set of means. Whereas
causation models consist of many-to-one mappings, effectuation models involve one-to-many
mappings.
Both causation and effectuation are integral
parts of human reasoning that can occur simultaneously, overlapping and intertwining over
different contexts of decisions and actions. Yet
in this article I deliberately juxtapose them as a
dichotomy to enable clearer theoretical exposition. Before embarking on a literature review to
delineate the space for effectuation models, I
present two realistic examples from business to
illustrate and compare the two types of decision
processes (i.e., causation and effectuation). The
first thought experiment is a hypothetical one
that of creating an imaginary restaurantand
the second is historicalthe story of U-Haul.
Thought Experiment #1: Curry in a Hurry
In this example I trace the process for building
an imaginary Indian restaurant, "Curry in a
Hurry." Two cases, one using causation and the
other effectuation, are examined. For the purposes of this illustration, the example chosen is
a typical causation process that underlies many
economic theories todaytheories in which it is
argued that artifacts such as firms are inevitable outcomes, given the preference orderings of
economic actors and certain simple assumptions of rationality (implying causal reasoning)
in their choice behavior. The causation process
used in the example here is typified by and
embodied in the procedures stated by Philip
Kotler in his Marketing Management (1991: 63,
263), a book that in its many editions is consid-

246

Academy of Management Review

ered a classic and is widely used as a textbook

in MBA programs around the world.
Kotler defines a market as follows: "A market
consists of all the potential customers sharing a
particular need or want who might be willing
and able to engage in exchange to satisfy that
need or want" (1991: 63). Given a product or a
service, Kotler suggests the following procedure
for bringing the product/service to market (note
that Kotler assumes the market exists):
1. Analyze long-run opportunities in the
market.
2. Research and select target markets.
Identify segmentation variables and segment the market.
Develop profiles of resulting segments.
Evaluate the attractiveness of each segment.
Select the target segment(s).
Identify possible positioning concepts for
each target segment.
Select, develop, and communicate the
chosen positioning concept.
3. Design marketing strategies.
4. Plan marketing programs.
5. Organize, implement, and control marketing effort.

This process is commonly known in marketing

as the STPsegmentation, targeting, and positioningprocess.
Curry in a Hurry is a restaurant with a new
twistsay, an Indian restaurant with a fast food
section. The current paradigm using causation
processes indicates that, to implement this idea,
the entrepreneur should start with a universe of
all potential customers. Let us imagine that she
wants to build her restaurant in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, USA, which will then become the
initial universe or market ior Curry in a Hurry.
Assuming that the percentage of the population
of Pittsburgh that totally abhors Indian food is
negligible, the entrepreneur can start the STP
process.
Several relevant segmentation variables,
such as demographics, residential neighborhoods, ethnic origin, marital status, income
level, and patterns of eating out, could be used.
Based on these, the entrepreneur could send out
questionnaires to selected neighborhoods and
organize focus groups at, say, the two major
universities in Pittsburgh. Analyzing responses
to the questionnaires and focus groups, she
could arrive at a target segmentfor example,
wealthy families, both Indian and others, who

April

eat out at least twice a week. That would help

her determine her menu choices, decor, hours,
and other operational details. She could then
design marketing and sales campaigns to induce her target segment to try her restaurant.
She could also visit other Indian and fast food
restaurants and find some method of surveying
them and then develop plausible demand forecasts for her planned restaurant.
In any case, the process would involve considerable amounts of time and analytical effort. It
would also recjuire resources both for research
and, thereafter, for implementing the marketing
strategies. In summary, the current paradigm
suggests that we proceed inward to specifics
from a larger, general universethat is, to an
optimal target segment from a predetermined
market. In terms of Curry in a Hurry, this could
mean something like a progression from the entire city of Pittsburgh to Fox Chapel (an affluent
residential neighborhood) to the Joneses (specific customer profile of a wealthy family), as it
were.
, Instead, if our imaginary entrepreneur were to
use processes of effectuation to build her restaurant, she would have to proceed in the opposite
direction (note that effectuation is suggested
here as a viable and descriptively valid alternative to the STP processnot as a normatively
superior one). For example, instead of starting
with the assumption of an existing market and
investing money and other resources to design
the best possible restaurant for the given market, she would begin by examining the particular set of means or causes available to her. Assuming she has extremely limited monetary
resourcessay $20,000she should think creatively to bring the idea to market with as close
to zero resources as possible. She could do this
by convincing an established restaurateur to become a strategic partner or by doing just enough
market research to convince a financier to invest
the money needed to start the restaurant. Another method of effectuation would be to convince a local Indian restaurant or a local fast
food restaurant to allow her to put up a counter
where she would actually sell a selection of
Indian fast food. Selecting a menu and honing
other such details would be seat-of-the-pants
and tentative, perhaps a process of satisficing
(Simon, 1959).
Several other courses of effectuation can be
imagined. Perhaps the course the entrepreneur

2001

Sarasvathy

actually pursues is to contact one or two of her

friends or relatives who work downtown and
bring them and their office colleagues some of
her food to taste. If the people in the office like
her food, she might get a lunch delivery service
going. Over time, she might develop enough of a
customer base to start a restaurant or else, after
a few weeks of trying to build the lunch business, she might discover that the people who
said they enjoyed her food did not really enjoy it
so much as they did her quirky personality and
conversation, particularly her rather unusual
life perceptions. Our imaginary entrepreneur
might now decide to give up the lunch business
and start writing a book, going on the lecture
circuit and eventually building a business in the
motivational consulting industry!
Given the exact same starting pointbut with
a different set of contingenciesthe entrepreneur might end up building one of a variety of
businesses. To take a quick tour of some possibilities, consider the following: Whoever first
buys the food from our imaginary Curry in a
Hurry entrepreneur becomes, by definition, the
first target customer. By continually listening to
the customer and building an ever-increasing
network of customers and strategic partners, the
entrepreneur can then identify a workable segment profile. For example, if the first customers
who actually buy the food and come back for
more are working women of varied ethnic origin,
this becomes her target segment. Depending on
what the first customer really wants, she can
start defining her market. If the customer is really interested in the food, the entrepreneur can
start targeting all working women in the geographic location, or she can think in terms of
locating more outlets in areas with working
women of similar profilesa "Women in a
Hurry" franchise?
Or, if the customer is interested primarily in
the idea of ethnic or exotic entertainment, rather
than merely in food, the entrepreneur might develop other products, such as catering services,
party planning, and so on"Curry Favors"?^
Perhaps, if the customers buy food from her because they actually enjoy learning about new
cultures, she might offer lectures and classes,
maybe beginning with Indian cooking and mov-

^ I apologize for the cheesy names, but, hopefully, they get

the message across.

247

ing on to cultural aspects, including concerts

and ancient history and philosophy, and the profound idea that food is a vehicle of cultural
exploration"School of Curry"? Or maybe what
really interests them is theme tours and other
travel options to India and the Far East
"Curryland Travels"?
In a nutshell, in using effectuation processes
to build her firm, the entrepreneur can build
several different types of firms in completely
disparate industries. This means that the original idea (or set of causes) does not imply any
one single strategic universe for the firm (or
effect). Instead, the process of effectuation allows the entrepreneur to create one or more several possible effects irrespective of the generalized end goal with which she started. The
process not only enables the realization of several possible effects (although generally one or
only a few are actually realized in the implementation) but it also allows a decision maker to
change his or her goals and even to shape and
construct them over time, making use of contingencies as they arise.
Furthermore, even the generalized aspiration
of starting a business is not a necessary starting
point for effectuation processes. Several successful businesses and even great companies
have begun without any conscious initial intention on the part of the founders. To cite but one
example, the waste management giant Browning Ferris Industries (BFI) began as the result of
contingent problem solving. In 1967, while presiding over a community association meeting,
Tom Fatjo, a respected professional in Houston,
Texas, listened to members whine about the
garbage problem in their subdivision. Exasperated, he suggested that maybe the community
should haul its own garbage. The community
turned to him and dared him to do it himself.
After physically hauling garbage while continuing his professional career for over a year, he
realized the potential in garbage and went on to
build BFI.
In a similar vein, the Curry in a Hurry entrepreneur's journey of effectuation might also be
the result of any one of a wide variety of serendipitous events. For example, a chance suggestion made by a friend after tasting her food on a
social occasion might have started the process
or, as happens in the case of many entrepreneurs today, an unexpected misfortune might
have forced her to earn a living on her own.

248

April

Academy of Management Review

Thought Experiment #2: U-Haul

The following example also consists of a

thought experiment to trace the processes used
in the creation of U-Haul. Although there is no
detailed history of U-Haul in which the actual
processes used by its founder are traced, the
thought experiment uses extracts from the company's history posted on its website, combined
with Silver's study:
Like many other successful ventures, the concept for U-Haul was provoked by need. After
World War II the population of the United States
became more mobile and migratory. There existed an obvious widespread need for do-ityourself moving equipment on a one-way, nationwide basis. It was the visionary approach of
U-Haul that recognized this need, acted upon it
and literally created an industry.
With $5,000, L. S. Shoen, his wife Anna Mary
Carty Shoen and their young child moved to the
Carty ranch in Ridgefield, Washington. There,
with the help of the Carty family, the Shoens built
the first U-Haul trailers in the iall of 1945, using
the ranch's automobile garage (and milk house)
as the first manufacturing plant for the budding
U-Haul Co.
By the end of 1949, it was possible to rent a
trailer one-way Irom city-to-city throughout most
of the United States (Silver, 1985: 387-390).

The historical facts are that in four years

Shoen transformed his perception of an obvious
widespread need, $5,000, and access to an automobile garage into a nationwide firm with a
complicated production function, thousands of
stakeholders, and what was essentially 100 percent market share in the newiy created do-ityourself moving industry. In our thought experiment we can now examine the minimal set of
decisions that he had to make in effecting this
transformation:
1. How many moving vans/trucks should he
buy or make?
2. How many locations would he need to
open?
3. How many employees should he hire? (One
per location or more?)
4. From whom should he raise the capital?
5. Should he open a few locations regionally
or go national at once?
6. How should he establish his market presenceadvertise? If so, how?
7. Putting it all together, how should he price
the product?
8. Given the fact that all he had was $5,000 to
begin with, should he move to Ridgefield
and begin building the trucks?

If we examine each of these entrepreneurial

decisions using only causation processes, the
best current theory and practice within each
functional domain will fail to lead us to a good
decision. For instance, if we examine the marketing decisions using current theories and
practice in marketing, we have to figure out the
potential universe of customers for U-Haul and
develop a marketing plan that targets the segment with the highest potential for return on
investment. Even if Shoen could somehow find a
way to figure all this out in 1945 without exhausting his initial capital of $5,000, there was
presumably no way he would be able to realistically convince any potential investor to put up
the enormous outlay called for in such a marketing plan.
This has been tested through class discussions using the creation of U-Haul as a case
study. Students typically come to one of two
conclusions:

;...; ': '.-

; -?' S * s ?-. 4 ' ; : ; - , ,

1. This project is not financially viablethe

resource requirements are very large (estimates range between $20 million and $50
million in current dollars) and overwhelm
any attempt to price the service viably: OR
2. This project is not viable psychologically
even if it were financially viable and potentially profitable, the initial resources required would be so large as to raise the
question of why anybody with control over
$20 to $50 million would want to invest it in
,.,,, this relatively mundane but risky project
consisting of buying trucks and renting locations across the country.

Yet U-Haul was created with an almost instantaneous national presence for a very small financial outlay!
Shoen used processes of effectuation that involved his seizing and exploiting contingencies
through an expanding network of human alliances. Instead of trying to raise the money to
buy a large number of trucks or trying to start
the company with very few locations, he did the
following:*
He began by establishing an identity. The
trailers were painted bright orange. The
name "U-Haul Co." was established. Trailers were imaged on the sides and back with
a sales message: "U-Haul Co., Rental Trail-

* The sources used were the compxiny's own historical

records and Silver (1985).

2001

'
"
,.:
.

Sarasvathy

ers, $2.00 Per Day"always advertising

them, whether on the road or on display.
He convinced friends, family members, and
customers (who then convinced others close
to them, and so on) to individually make
down payments on trucks and then lend him
the use of the trucks.
He contracted with service station outlets
(including national chains) to merchandise
trailer rentals, eliminating the need for buying space in cities across the country and for
recruiting employees to man the spaces.
"He offered early customers a discount on
their trailer rental for establishing a U-Haul
rental agent at their destination and established a commission structure for dealers.

Thus, with hardly any employees and a ridiculously small outlay of funds, U-Haul came into
being. Furthermore, in the case of U-Haul, in the
initial stages of implementing processes of effectuation, the firm appears almost to have been
in the business of selling livelihoods to potential U-Haul franchisees (before the idea of franchising was developed), rather than in the oneway rental business.
This case study particularly highlights the
unique role of the decision maker in solving the
existence problem through effectuation. Characteristics of decision makers, such as who they
are, what they know, and whom they know, form
the primary set of means that combine with contingencies to create an effect that is not preselected but that gets consfrucfed as an integral
part of the effectuation process. The effectuator
merely pursues an aspiration and visualizes a
set of actions for transforming the original idea
into a firmnot into the particular predetermined or optimal firm, but a very generalized
aspiration of a firm. The commitment to such a
tentative set of actions includes proceeding with
no a priori guarantees or even strong potentialities for success. The effectuator more often than
not proceeds without any certainties about the
existence of a market or a demand curve, let
alone a market for his or her product, or a potential revenue curve.
In cases involving spectacular successes (Silver, 1985), the effectuating entrepreneurs' vision
appears to involve more than the identification
and pursuit of an opportunity; it seems to include the very creafion of the opportunity as part
of the implementation of the entrepreneurial
process. The latent market for U-Haul, consisting of the obvious widespread need for one-way
rentals, was only a necessary condition for its

249

actualization. Sufficiency is provided by active

implementations of imagined solutions that
seize and build on several types of contingencies that ultimately carve out the structure and
shape of the market. Currently, markets on the
internet are being created in this manner,
through contingent interactions between the
imaginations of effectuators and the aspirations
of their partners in the process, whether the
partners consist of customers, investors, and/or
various types of alliances.
A RUDIMENTARY THEORY OF EFFECTUATION
PROCESSES IN BUSINESS

Before developing a theory for decisions involving effectuation and delineating its space
within the literature, it is necessary to emphasize that effectuation processes are not posited
here as "better" or "more efficient" than causation processes in creating artifacts such as
firms, markets, and economies. Under what circumstances which types of processes provide
particular advantages and disadvantages is an
issue to be resolved through future empirical
studies. For example, in the thought experiment
of Curry in a Hurry, presented above, if the entrepreneur clearly wants to build an up-scale
Indian restaurant, she presumably will be better
off using causation processes than effectuation.
But if she has only the generalized aspiration of
building a successful business of her own with
relatively limited access to resources, she
should consider effectuation processes.
Summarizing from the literature on decision
making, the anatomy of a decision involves
a given goal to be achieved or a decision to
be made (usually well structured and specific),
a set of alternative means or causes (that
can be generated through the decision process),
constraints on possible means (usually imposed by the environment), and
criteria for selecting between the means
(usually maximization of expected return in
terms of the predetermined goal).
Clearly, this structure assumes a decision process involving causation.
A decision involving effectuation, however,
consists of
a given set of means (that usually consists
of relatively unalterable characteristics/
circumstances of the decision maker).

250

Academy of Management Review

a set of effects or possible operationalizations of generalized aspirations (mostly generated through the decision process),
constraints on (and opportunities for) possible effects (usually imposed by the limited
means as well as by the environment and its
contingencies), and
criteria for selecting between the effects
(usually a predetermined level of affordable
loss or acceptable risk related to the given
means).

Entrepreneurs begin with three categories of

"means": they know who they are, what they
know, and whom they knowtheir own traits,
tastes, and abilities; the knowledge corridors
they are in; and the social networks they are a
part of. At the level of the firm, the corresponding means are its physical resources, human
resources, and organizational resources, a la the
resource-based theory of the firm (Barney, 1991).
At the level of the economy, these means become demographics, current technology regimes, and sociopolitical institutions (such as
property rights).
One could speculate that effectuation processes are more general and more ubiquitous
than causation processes in human decisions.
For example, on most nights most people cook
dinner using an effectuation processthat is,
they look around in their kitchen cupboards for
what's available and fix themselves something.
Only rarely do they decide to throw a dinner
party and carefully develop a causation process
for accomplishing it (i.e., choose a menu, shop
for specific ingredients, and follow precise recipes). It stands to reason, then, that effectuation
processes may not be very helpful for throwing a
great dinner party. But human life usually
comes stocked with cupboards that open and
close at unexpected moments, often containing
unspecified ingredients that the decision maker
has little choice over; grocery shops are typically too far away or closed; and cookware often
has to be borrowed from neighbors. To put it
more mundanely, in cases in which a particular
effect has been preselected by the decision
maker, causation processes can be applied to
choose the best, the fastest, the most efficient, or
the most economical method to achieve the chosen effect; imagining possible effects and choosing among them, however, involve characteristics of the decision maker(s) and his or her (their)
ability to identify and use contingencies over a

April

dynamic process involving other decision makers interacting with one another.
Table 1 presents a list of the distinguishing
characteristics of the two types of processes.
Causation processes are effect dependent. Effectuation processes are actor dependent. Causation processes are excellent at exploiting
knowledge. Effectuation processes are excellent
at exploiting contingencies. Nature abounds in
particular events with regular causes that can
be analyzed and understood, and, therefore,
causation processes are excellent when dealing
with natural phenomena. Human life abounds
in contingencies that cannot easily be analyzed
and predicted but can only be seized and exploited, and, therefore, effectuation processes
are far more frequent and very much more useful in understanding and dealing with spheres
of human action. This is especially true when
dealing with the uncertainties of future phenomena and problems of existence.
An examination of existing research on decisions dealing with uncertainties pertaining to
the future (even if the research predominantly
involves causation processes) should be useful
in delineating the space for processes of effectuation. Researchers in areas ranging from
mathematics, statistics, and economics to psychology, sociology, and business have grappled
with decisions involving future phenomena. Historically, the research on decision making under
uncertainty can be divided into (1) the development of normative, rational decision models
(e.g., Focardi & Jonas, 1998; MacCrimmon,
Wehrung, & Stanbury, 1986; Shapira, 1997) and
(2) empirical investigations into bounds on that
rationality in actual decision makers (e.g., Einhorn & Hogarth, 1981; Kahneman & Tversky,
1990; Taylor 1984; Zey, 1998).
The normative development is rooted in the
conceptual distinction between "risk" and "uncertainty" (Knight, 1921). The commonly used
statistical metaphor of the urn containing different colored balls serves to illustrate the difference between the two (Kamien, 1994). Problems
involving risk are akin to a speculative game
involving an urn containing five green balls and
five red balls. Whoever draws a red ball is
awarded a prize of $50. For any given draw, we
can precisely calculate the probability of getting a red ball, because we know the underlying
distribution of balls inside the urn from which
we are making the draw. Problems involving

2001

Sarasvathy

251

TABLE 1
Contrasting Causation and Effectuation
Categories of
Differentiation

Causation Processes

Effectuation Processes

Givens

Effect is given

Only some means or tools are given

Decision-making
selection criteria

Help choose between means to achieve

the given effect
Selection criteria based on expected
return
Effect dependent: Choice of means is
driven by characteristics of the effect
the decision maker wants to create and
his or her knowledge of possible
means
Excellent at exploiting knowledge

Help choose between possible effects that

can be created with given means
Selection criteria based on affordable loss
or acceptable risk
Actor dependent: Given specific means,
choice of effect is driven by
characteristics of the actor and his or her
ability to discover and use contingencies

More ubiquitous in nature

More ubiquitous in human action

More useful in static, linear, and

independent environments

Explicit assumption of dynamic, nonlinear,

and ecological environments

Nature of
unknowns

Focus on the predictable aspects of an

uncertain future

Focus on the controllable aspects of an

unpredictable future

Underlying logic

To the extent we can predict future, we

can control it

To the extent we can control future, we do

not need to predict it

Outcomes

Market share in existent markets throui

competitive strategies

New markets created through alliances and

other cooperative strategies

Competencies
employed
Context of
relevance

uncertainty involve the same award of $50 for

the draw of a red ball, except we do not know
how many balls are in the urn, what colors they
are, or even if there are any red balls at all in the
distribution. In statistical terminology, decisions involving the first type of urn, with the
known distribution, call for classical analytical
techniques, and decisions involving the second
type of urn, with the unknown distribution, call
for estimation techniques. Once the underlying
distribution is discovered through estimation
procedures, the urn with the unknown distribution is transformed, as it were, into the urn with
the known distribution, and it becomes susceptible to analytical techniques.
Real-life examples of risk include all types of
insurance, some areas of the stock markets, and
gaming of various types. Forecasting demand
for very well-established products, such as
Coca-Cola or personal computers nowadays,
also falls within this category. Some real-life
examples of uncertain fy include dealing with
environmental pollution, global warming, ge-

Excellent at exploiting contingencies

netic cloning, and commercialization of innovationsparticularly radical innovations.

Experiments by researchers developing normative models have demonstrated that human
beings in general prefer the "risky or known
distribution" urn over the "uncertain or unknown distribution" urn (EUsberg, 1981). But
some researchers, such as those studying creative problem solving (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976), scientific discovery (Kulkarni & Simon, 1986), and entrepreneurship (Dickson &
Giglierano, 1988; Kamien, 1994), have speculated
that since creative problem solvers like entrepreneurs have been shown to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, they will have a preference
for the urn with the unknown distribution.
Both normative approaches have been qualified by other researchers, who have shown that
human beings in general are not strictly rational (Simon, 1959). Instead, their rationality is
bounded by cognitive limitations, such as physiological constraints on computational capacity
(Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993), and psycho-

252

Academy of Management Review

logical limitations, such as biases and fallacies

(Bar-Hillel, 1980; Tversky & Kahneman, 1982). Yet
this does not imply that decision makers are
irrational. Rather, the evidence suggests that
within certain bounds, decision makers use heuristics and inductive logics that often lead to
very effective decisions (Gigerenzer, Hell, St
Blank, 1988),
The arguments from both perspectives
unbounded rationality and bounded rationalitycan be summarized as follows. If the decision makers believe they are dealing with a
measurable or relatively predictable future,
they will tend to do some systematic information
gathering and invest some effort on a reasonable analysis of that information, within certain
bounds. Similarly, if they believe they are dealing with relatively unpredictable phenomena,
they will try to gather information through experimental and iterative learning techniques
aimed at first discovering the underlying distribution of the future. This logically implies that
the decision makers' underlying beliefs about
the future phenomena that impact a particular
decision can be deduced by examining the types
of heuristics and logical approaches they use in
making the decision.
In terms of the urn metaphor used to describe
causation processes of risk and uncertainty, the
process of effectuation seems to suggest the following conjecture about a decision maker's logic: "I do not care what color the balls are in the
urn or what their underlying distribution is. If I
am playing a game where drawing a red ball
wins $50, I will go acquire red balls and put
them in the urn. I will also look for other people
who have red balls and induce them to put them
in the urn and play the game as my partners. As
time goes by, there will be so many red balls in
the distribution as to make almost every draw a
red ball. Furthermore, if neither I nor my acquaintances have red balls, but only green ones,
we will put enough of them in the urn so as to
make the original game obsolete and create a
new game where green balls win."
In sum, this conjecture can be embodied in the
following four principles that form the core of a
rudimentary theory of effectuation, graphically
depicted in Figure 1:
I. Affordable loss rather than expected
returns: Causation models focus on maximizing
the potential returns for a decision by selecting
optimal strategies. Effectuation predetermines

April

how much loss is affordable and focuses on experimenting with as many strategies as possible with the given limited means. The effectuator prefers options that create more options in
the future over those that maximize returns in
the present.
2. Strategic alliances rather than competitive analyses: Causation models, such as the
Porter model in strategy, emphasize detailed
competitive analyses (Porter, 1980). Effectuation emphasizes strategic alliances and precommitments from stakeholders as a way to
reduce and/or eliminate uncertainty and to
erect entry barriers,
3. Exploitation of contingencies rather than
exploitation of preexisting knowledge: When
preexisting knowledge, such as expertise in a
particular new technology, forms the source of
competitive advantage, causation models might
be preferable. Effectuation, however, would be
better for exploiting contingencies that arose
unexpectedly over time,
4. Controlling an unpredictable future rather
than predicting an uncertain one: Causation
processes focus on the predictable aspects of an
uncertain future. The logic for using causation
processes is: To the extent that we can predict
the future, we can control it. Effectuation, however, focuses on the confroiJabie aspects of an
unpredictable future. The logic for using effectuation processes is: To the extent that we can
control the future, we do not need to predict it.
This logic is particularly useful in areas
where human action (locally or in the aggregate) is the predominant factor shaping the future. For example, instead of defining a market
as the universe of all possible customers as Kotler defines it, an effectuator would define his or
her market as a community of people willing
and able to commit enough resources and talents to sustain the particular enterprise. In the
former case, the market is assumed to exist independent of the firm or entrepreneur, and the
task of the entrepreneur becomes to grab as
much of that market as possible. In the latter
case, however, the founder, along with others,
creates the market by bringing together enough
stakeholders who "buy into" the idea to sustain
the enterprise. Since the structure of what exactly the enterprise is is left open and is dependent upon the particular commitments made by
the stakeholders, the need for prediction is
greatly reduced, if not completely obliterated. In

2001

Sarasvathy

253

,2

,1

IB

piS-j

le

0)

111

Contingencies

M O O

-ol!
sit
o "o 2

il^

III
.:,il:X'

1?

:-:::, .

ll
(/)

tn

sa

S3

if

D J

eet

Efl eet

eet

eet

eet

Eff eet

If

pa

pa

pa

Eff eet

Si

g S.

"^

II

II
i
S gag&
| ^
>

Ul

ator

"o

1^
a
IS

si!
IJ1
o u
PQ

Ul

'a

o o

>
'a

II
0> 9)

2S4

Academy of Management Review

April

Other words, the particular firm created becomes

fhe residual of a process of constructing a network of partnerships and precommitments (Burt,
1992), and the market itself is an aggregated
taxonomy of such sustainable sets of partnerships and commitments.

.., We should indeed be able to develop better

techniques. Whatever those techniques may be,
however, they will almost certainly undermine
the superstructure of biases erected on purpose,
consistency, and rationality. They will involve
some way of thinking about action now as occurring in terms of a set of unknown future values
(March, 1982: 75),

CONNECTIONS WITH EXISTING THEORIES

AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

From the pioneering work Organizations (March

& Simon, 1958) to several recent articles in management journals, March has created a substantial body of theories and empirical evidence on
how human beings behave, make decisions, and
interact with one another and with the external
environment in organizations. Of particular value
to building a theory of effectuation are his ideas
on the tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation in organizational learning (March, 1991) and
his inspirational exhortation to researchers to
challenge the assumption of preexistent goals in
decision making (March, 1982).
..
;
Organizational learning involves decisions in
which scarce resources (including attention) are
allocated between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties.
These decisions are complicated by the fact that
their costs and benefits may be dispersed over
time and space and that they are subject to the
effects of ecological interaction. Yet, balancing
the allocation between exploration and exploitation is crucial to the survival and sustenance
of the organization. Understanding the relationship between these two horns of a continuing
dilemma in organizational evolution leads us
away from a linear approach to such concepts
as "success" and "sustainable competitive advantage," For example, by introducing a new
technology, such as a computerized decision
support system, an organization may decrease
its chances of being the worst competitor, but it
may reduce its chances of being the overall winner in the game (March, 1991: 84).
It would be rather obvious to speculate that
decision units of exploration would contain processes of effectuation, whereas causation models would dominate exploitation. But, more interesting, one could speculate that the problem
of allocation of resources between exploration
and exploitation might itself be modeled more
effectively using an effectuation rather than a
causation modei. March's exposition on exploration and exploitation also brings out that
causal reasoning and effectual reasoning need

A theory, however rudimentary, should not

only identify gaps in our existing understanding
of phenomena but should also be able to integrate existing theories and evidence that do not
quite fit the current paradigm and, ultimately,
should provide new hypotheses and predictions
to be tested through future work. In this section
I examine an important subset of existing theories and evidence that does not quite fit into the
current paradigm of decision making using causation processes. In the next section I set out a
list of propositions for decision making at all
four levels of business phenomena.
The intellectual lineage of the ideas influencing the theory of effectuation presented in this
article includes a very large and impressive list
of thinkers, ranging from the pragmatic philosophers at the turn of the century to current leaders of thought in economics and management:
Peirce (1878), James (1912), Knight (1921), Lindblom (1959), Simon (1959), Vickers (1965), Allison
(1989), Weick (1979), Nystrom & Starbuck (1981),
Buchanan & Vanberg (1991), March (1982), Burt
(1992), and Mintzberg (1994). I examine a limited
subset of the theoretical work done by three of
these researchers here and follow with some
additional empirical evidence that does not fit
into the current paradigm. I also present brief
outlines of future theoretical development outside the scope of the current paper. Along the
way, I highlight connections to effectuation.
lames G. March
To say that we make decisions now in terms of
goals that will only be knowable later is nonsensicalas long as we accept the basic framework
of the theory of choice and its presumptions of
pre-existent goals,
I do not know in detail what is required, but I
think it will be substantial. As we challenge the
dogma of pre-existent goals, we will be forced
to reexamine some of our most precious prejudices , , , ,

2001

Sarasvathy

not always pull in opposite directions. Instead,

they can work in a complementary fashion, just
as exploration and exploitation can both be
used by a firm to sustain its market share over
different spatial and temporal contexts.
Henry Mintzberg
I would like to introduce just one fact* here. In
one sense, it is the only real fact I know in all of
the literature of strategic management,,,
.,, Honda's success, (in capturing two thirds of
the American motorcycle market) if we are to believe those who did it and not those who figured it,
was built precisely on what they initially believed
to be a probable non-starternamely the small motorcycle. Their own priors were that a market without small motorcycles would not buy small motorcycles. Had they had a proper planning process in
place ,,, this non-starter would have been eliminated at the outsetplan rationally and be done
with it. But Honda was badly managed in this regard, and so a few Japanese managers, riding
around on those little things in Los Angeles, were
pleasantly surprised. They learned, (General Motors was apparently well managed in this regard,
because a product development manager there
once told me that they had a mini-van on the drawing boards long before Chrysler ever did but that
this probable non-starter was scuttled in the planning process) (Mintzberg, 1991: 92),

Success stories of probable nonstarters

abound in the history of economics, management, and human affairs in general. For example, Polanyi comments on one of his contributions to physics:
I would never have conceived my theory, let alone
have made a great effort to verify it, if I had been
more familiar with major developments in physics
that were taking place. Moreover, my initial ignorance of the powerful, false objections that were
raised against my ideas protected those ideas from
being nipped in the bud (Polanyi, 1963: 1013),

255

the considered opinions of mutual fund experts

(Borges, Goldstein, Ortmann, & Gigerenzer,
1999), Another example of the benefits of not
having expertise comes from the area of research methods, embodied in Gersick's discovery of a new model of group development. Eschewing the normative linear movement of
researchfrom careful literature review to deduction of hypotheses, to careful operationalization, to design, to inference makingshe
adopted a mode of unconstrained curiosity and
immersion in the phenomena, which led her to
the element of surprise that was crucial to her
discovery (Gersick, 1992).
The prolificacy of successful nonstarters in human affairs is matched only by sure things that
fail disastrously. In a detailed review of the predictive accuracy of forecasting by experts in various fields, including population, economics, technology, and so forth, Hogarth and Makridakis
(1981) conclude that the evidence indicated forecasting errors varied from a few to a few hundred
percentage points and that forecasting was notoriously inaccurate. Also, using hundreds of studies in management and other areas of human
behavior, Mintzberg makes a powerful argument
that strategic planning is "not" strategy formation
(Mintzberg, 1994), Once again, the evidence seems
to suggest that a different model of decision making is required: one that does not focus on analysis
and prediction but on synthesis and action. Effectuation provides one possible altemative, particularly in the problem of strategy formafion,
which belongs in the category of existence problems such as those listed in the beginning of
this article.
Karl E. Weick

Researchers in cognitive science have explored

the importance of so-called ignorance in the
form of a recognition heuristic. This research
into ignorance-based heuristics explains phenomena such as (1) the success of Benetton's ad
campaign that conveyed nothing about the
product but sought only to induce name recognition (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999) and (2) the
striking stock market returns generated by the
recognition knowledge of pedestrians that beat

I want to argue that one reason we theorize

poorly about what matters most is because we
use discourse that makes it hard to capture living
forward. Living forward is a blend of thrownness,
making do, journeys stitched together by faith,
presumptions, expectations, alertness, and actionsall of which may amount to something,
although we will know for sure what that something may be only when it is too late to do much
about it. Unsettled, emergent, contingent living
forward contrasts sharply with our backwardoriented theoretical propositions that depict that
living as settled, causally connected, and coherent after the fact (Weick, 1999: 135),

*The fact he is referring to is the title of the article,

"Learning 1, Plarming 0,"

Weick's theory of enactment-retention-selection puts decision makers in organizations at

256

Academy of Management Review

the center stage of the organization's evolution

(Weick, 1979). Unlike in commonly accepted
models of evolution, where selection is exclusively the prerogative of the environment, Weick
argues that "decision makers in organizations
intervene between the environment and its effects inside the organization, which means that
selection criteria become lodged more in
the decision-makers than in the environment"
(Weick, 1979: 125),
But this intervention is not coherently planned
or causally prescribed as most mainstream research on organizations seems to emphasize.
Instead, in the theory of enactment, a nonlinear
process that is strongly evocative of the "living
forward" model of effectuation is assumed.
Using such examples as Mozart's description of
how he composed music, Weick links enactment
to the idea that actors in organizations are involved more in making retrospective sense of
their actions than in acting based on predetermined goals and causal rationality (Weick,
1995), Although Weick does not especially focus
on the creation of an organization from scratch,
the basic decision unit of the larger organizational processes of enactment and sensemaking
can be posited as a model of effectuation rather
than causation,^
Future Theoretical Work on Effectuation
Integrating March, Mintzberg, and Weick.
March's ideas on exploration and the challenge
to preexistent goals, Mintzberg's gathering of
evidence against planning and prediction, and
Weick's emphasis on enactment and living forward are all integrated in this article into a
model of effectual reasoning that explicitly addresses (1) a logic of control (rather than prediction), (2) endogenous goal creation, and (3) a
(partially) constructed environment. Additionally, building upon the preceding theories' subconcepts, which basically pose a disconnect of
intention, action, and meaning, here I show how
effectuation inverts causal reasoning to indicate
a new connection among means, imagination,
and action that helps generate intentions and
meaning in an endogenous fashion.
^ I am attempting a more detailed examination of the
links between effectuation and the ideas of March and
Weick, as well as others, such as Lindblom and Simon, in a
subsequent paper.

April

Effectuation in areas other than the creation of

economic artifacts. I have primarily brought out
the role of effectuation within the normative decision theory literature, but there is a substantial body of theoretical and empirical work providing altemative perspectives that need to be
examined in more detail. Connections of effectuation with such theories as March's "garbage
can" model, Weick's enactment processes, Lindblom's successive comparisons framework, Gigerenzer's ignorance-based heuristics, Simon's
bounded rationality, and several others (e.g., the
literature on improvisation and bricolage) have
to be explored in depth. For example, in considering the issue of endogenous goal creation in
the context of public policy formulation, Lindblom develops an alternative to traditional rational comprehensive models of decision making (Lindblom, 1959), In his "successive limited
comparisons" method of policy making, the policy maker directly chooses between policies
rather than first developing an ordered set of
values and subsequently evaluating the policies on how well they attain the prioritized values. In other words, the policy maker does not
separate ends from means; the choice of means
embodies within it the policy maker's selection
of ends,
Lindblom's model is clearly not one of causal
reasoning. It embodies several principles of effectual reasoning. Particularly, in the model,
Lindblom embraces bounded rationality and endogenous and contingent goal creation, and explicitly eschews prediction. Instead of with
"means," in the sense in which they have been
discussed in the current exposition on effectuation, Lindblom's model begins with a very limited set of actual policies, and in it Lindblom
seeks to select between the marginal combinations of values (ends) that the policy maker
wishes to attain, Lindblom's successive comparisons model is an application of effectual reasoning to a very different context of decision
making than the creation of economic artifacts.
The central focus in the Lindblom model is on
conflicting values: both conflicts between decision makers and the reiafive conflicts among
the value priorities of an individual decision
maker under different spatial and temporal contexts of decision making, Lindblom's theory indicates that it would be interesting to identify
and examine areas other than the creation of
economic artifacts for applications of effectual

2001

Sarasvathy

257

reasoning. Such an endeavor would be particularly necessary to develop a general theory of

effectuationa task clearly beyond the scope of
this paper.
For now, the primary enhancement that effectuation brings to earlier theories, particularly in
economics and management, is the connection
with causal reasoning and the explicit logic of
control versus prediction in human affairs. This
enhancement is important in that it outlines the
existence of a form of reasoning that is not
merely a deviation from causal reasoning. Instead, effectuation suggests a hitherto unspecified altemative logic that might unite several of
the earlier theories into a newly coherent paradigm of decision making.
Connections with other nonlinear approaches.
In a similar vein, the connection of effectuation
to nonlinear approaches, such as chaos/complexity theories, needs to be investigated. I am
attempting this in a separate essay in which the
processes of effectual reasoning are united with
the structural property of near decomposability
in complex systems that has been proven to
speed up their evolution (Simon, 1996), Together,
effectuation and near decomposability may explain not only the creation of new firms but also
the creation of rapidly growing, innovative, and
enduring firms (Sarasvathy & Simon, 2000).
Connections with the philosophical underpinnings of causation. Causation has a very old
and venerable lineage in philosophy. In "abducting"' a theory of effectual reasoning, one
must pay attention to the several centuries of
continuing conversation about causationfrom
Aristotle down to more recent theorizing, such as
John Mackie's INUS condition (Mackie, 1998).
Mackie defines a cause as an /nsufficient but
Necessary component of an Unnecessary but
Sufficient condition, offering potentially a more
precise way of introducing plurality, nonlinearity, and contingency into causal reasoning without assuming away the qualitative variables.
Aristotle argued that there are four causes to
all phenomenanamely, material cause, efficient cause, formal cause, and final cause

(sometimes called "teleology"). The simplest

way to understand the four causes is to consider
a phenomenon such as a house and ask, "Why
house?" According to Aristotle, four categories
of answers emerge:

^ The logician Charles Sander Peirce developed the concept of "abduction" as a third altemative to "deduction" and
"induction," Abduction involves creating new hypotheses
purely from imagination, as opposed to deducing them from
first principles or axioms or inducing them from data or
empirical findings.

The three models of market process described by

Buchanan and Vanberg are evocative of the statistical metaphor of the urn used in an earlier section, AJJocafive process suggests the urn with the known distribution, discovery
process suggests the urn with the unknown distribution, and
creative process evokes effectuation.

1, The house is what it is because of the

materials that went into the building of it
(material cause),
2, The house is what it is because of the people (masons, bricklayers, and so forth) who
actually built ittheir skills, care, and so on
(efficient cause),
3, The house is what it is because of the architect's plan (formal cause),
4, The house is what it is because of the people who own it and live in it: whether they
wish to raise children or have wild parties
there, for example, will determine what the
house is (final cause).

The conversation on causation, of course, has

developed well beyond Aristotle's ideas. Particularly, the work of biomathematician Robert
Rosen in Life Itself suggests that the conversation since Aristotle (all of the conversation of
modern science, for example) has been almost
exclusively limited to the first three causes: material, formal, and efficient (Rosen, 1991), Rosen
argues that the standard form of a mathematical
function f^(x) incorporates the three causes, with
"x" being the material cause, "/" the efficient,
and "a" the formal. But scientists in general do
not seem to tackle final cause or teleology very
well. While physical scientists have tended to
avoid teleology altogether, social scientists,
particularly in economic sciences, have, in general, exogenously imposed one on the phenomena they study, Buchanan and Vanberg point
that out in detail in an article entitled "The Market As a Creative Process":
We have suggested that a perceptual vision of
the market as a creative process offers more insight and understanding than the alternative visions that elicit interpretations of the market as a
discovery process, or, more familiarly, as an allocative process,^ In either of the latter alternatives, there is a telos imposed by the scientist's
own perception, a telos that is nonexistent in the
first stance (1991: 183).

258

Academy of Management Review

As researchers, we seem to do this (impute an

exogenous telos) mostly because it allows us to
apply the other three causes relatively easily to
human behavior or, more precisely, allows us to
"explain" and seemingly "predict" human behavior in terms of the first three causes alone.
The key, however, is to find a way to theorize
about human behavior without either ignoring
telos altogether or imposing/assuming one exogenously. It is clear, without going into further
detail, that a comparison of different causation
theoriesmechanical, narrative fiction, generative, successionist, and so onand a detailed
review of the entire historical flow on causal
reasoningexploring where effectual reasoning would join in and branch outwould be a
necessary endeavor for developing a comprehensive theory of effectuation.
Differentiating the ideas in this paper from
earlier theories. There are two key factors that
distinguish the ideas presented here from earlier theories that have each partially assaulted
the bastions of predictive rationality, preexistent goals, and environmental selection. The
first consists of the juxtaposition of effectual
reasoning with causality, and the second involves the logic of control instead of the focus on
prediction.
These two factors powerfully combine to help
us build the theoretical foundations for explaining the origins of economic artifacts as a function of the decision processes used by actual
entrepreneurs in creating and growing firms in
the real world. Empirical explorations (whether
historical, anecdotal, out in the field, or inside
the lab) are rife with examples of entrepreneurs'
and entrepreneurial firms' using decision processes other than those posited by traditional
causal reasoning. Examples include Eisenhardt
(1989), Ehringer (1995), Moorman and Miner
(1998), and others. The theory of effectuation provides the beginning of a robust and rigorous
basis for an empirically validated (and testable)
model of entrepreneurial decision making.
Connections to some recent empirical findings. Besides integrating previous theories that
challenge traditional assumptions of causal
reasoning and providing a testable model of
entrepreneurial decision making, a theory of
effectuation could explain some empirical findings (or the lack of them) in such areas as entrepreneurship. For several decades now, researchers have investigated the traits of

April

successful entrepreneurs and compared them

with failed entrepreneurs and nonentrepreneurs. Results, however, have been disappointingly mixed (see Gartner, 1988, for a comprehensive review).
The "successful entrepreneur" seems to be an
elusive, many-splendored beast. Successful entrepreneurs range all over the risk-preference
spectrum (Palich & Bagby, 1995); they make it to
both lists: the ten easiest bosses to work for and
the ten most difficult bosses to work for. Bleeding heart liberals and tough libertarians, and
shades in between, all build thriving firms. Furthermore, firms succeed by being bold and
brash and churning in change as much as by
being narrowly focused and conservative and
extremely understated in their strategies; both
formal strategic planning and lack of it seem to
have worked (Schwenk, 1988; Schwenk &
Shrader, 1993), In current theories based on causation, scholars have a tough time explaining
some of these phenomena and, particularly,
suggesting courses of action for particular individuals in creating particular economic artifacts.
The theory of effectuation brings another perspective to the table. It suggests we need to give
up ideas such as the successful personality or
clearly superior characteristics of the successful
firm or organization. Rather, we need to learn to
deal with a rain forest of individuals and firms
and markets and societies, intermeshed and woven together with completely coherent yet vastly
diverse local patterns that add up to a complex,
interdependent ecology of human artifacts. We
need to move away from the vision of (he "market" as a monolithic construct that rides roughshod over vast farmlands of homogenous
commodities, relentlessly separating the wheat
from the chaff, and start researching "markets"
as groups of individuals and communities developing a variety of gardens and parks based
on their particular tastes in landscaping and
architecture. Only then can we begin to explain
why people of all types seem to build successful
companies and other economic artifacts.
The focus in our journals and classrooms, for
example, would shift from "how to build a successful firm" or "how to become a successful
entrepreneur" to "What types of ideas and opportunities should YOU pursue?" and "Given
who you are, what you know, and whom you
know, what types of economic and/or social ar-

2001

Sarasvathy

tifacts can you, would you want to, and should

you create?" The old adage about invention captures this shift rather pithily: Both the optimist
and the pessimist contribute to successful inventions. The optimist invents the airplane: the pessimist, the parachute.
More important, the theory of effectuation suggests that to normatively unpack the critical factors of success and failure, we first need to disconnect the success of the individual
entrepreneur from the success of the firm he or
she creates. In fact, effectuation prescribes that
the concept of success/failure is not a 0-1 variablethat is, "success" is not the logical equivalent of "not failing," and vice versa. Rather,
within the theory of effectuation, any specific
firm is only one of many possible viable and
contingent combinations of a given set of means
with which the entrepreneur begins. Thus, effectuation posits a plurality of "failed" firms for any
one or more "successful" firms that actually get
created by any given entrepreneur. The normative aspects of effectuation, if any, for the creation of successful firms would have to do with
the "management" of failures rather than with
their avoidance. Given the scope of this article,
what exactly those normative features are is left
as an empirical question for future research.
PROPOSITIONS FOR THE ROLE OF
EFFECTUATION PROCESSES IN BUSINESSES

To summarize, effectuation processes are posited as the fundamental decision units in explanations of how economic artifacts such as firms,
markets, and economies come to be. Effectuation begins with a given set of causes, consisting of (mostly) unalterable characteristics and
circumstances of the decision maker, and the
focus is on choosing among alternative (desirable) effects that can be produced with the given
set of means, thereby eliminating the assumption of preexistent goals. Unlike in causation
models, which are usually static and in which
decision makers are assumed independent, in
effectuation a dynamic decision environment involving multiple interacting decision makers is
assumed. As explicated earlier, the four principles of effectuation, in contrast with causation,
involve
1, affordable loss, rather than expected returns;

259

2, strategic alliances, rather than competitive

analyses:
3, exploitation of contingencies, rather than
preexisting knowledge: and
4, control of an unpredictable future, rather
than prediction of an uncertain one.
Based on the foregoing exposition on processes of effectuation, in this section I give a set
of propositions that could be used as a basis for
future empirical work.

At the Level of the Economy

One of the most important concerns in macroeconomic policy is the fostering of entrepreneurial activity (both in start-ups and existing corporations) to spur innovation, productivity, and
growth in the economy. In free-market capitalism both job creation and increases in real per
capita income have been shown to depend on
entrepreneurial activity, particularly in the form
of new firm formation (Birch, 1987; Shane, 1995),
Because of this, governments at all levels
local, state, and nationalseek to enact policies
encouraging start-up entrepreneurs. Currently,
such policies are usually focused on encouraging entry in large numbers, in the hope that time
will weed out the failures, rather than encouraging certain fypes of enterprises or entrepreneurial strategies. According to Kenneth Arrow,
the conventional wisdom of encouraging entry
is based on modeling the market as a stochastic
process (see Sarasvathy, 2000), In this accepted
theory, it is assumed that the creation of firms
and the creation of markets are independent
processes. To be more precise, it is assumed that
markets exist either concurrently or latently and
that the markets determine, in a stochastic fashion, which firms survive and which fail.
The theory is based on data, from the National
Venture Capital Association, that suggest that
the expected success rate for new ventures is
very low (estimated at less than two in ten). In
light of this, the quest to reduce the failure rate
is one of the holy grails of research in entrepreneurship. The predominant method in this literature consists of trying to connect the performance of a firm to a variety of factors, such as
liability of newness, entrepreneurial orientation, and so forth. The results using this line of
research have, at best, been mixed (Henderson,
1999; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996),

aeo

April

Academy of Management Review

The theory of effectuation suggests another

approach. While the probability of failure in
new ventures may not be reducible because it
depends on a seemingly inexhaustible variety
of interacting factorsfrom the genes of the entrepreneur to changing weather patterns in the
larger socioeconomic-political environment
the costs of failure are another matter altogether. Because effectuation does not involve
elaborate planning and prediction costs but relies, instead, on precommitments to reduce uncertainties, we can state the following proposition about the role of effectuation at the level of
the economy.
Proposifion 1: Piefirms or very earlystage firms created through processes
oi effectuation, if they fail, will fail
early and/or at lower levels of investment than those created through processes of causation. Ergo, effectuation
processes allow the economy to experiment with more numbers of new
ideas at lower costs.
At the Level of the Market or Industry

Economic history is rich in stories about the

birth of new industries. Be they Josiah Wedgwood and his pots and vases, Edison and his
invention factory. Jobs and Wozniak and personal computers, or the founders of Netscape
and Amazon.com and e-commerce, entrepreneurs have helped create new markets and new
industries, as well as new firms and organizations in existing industries. But creating a firm
in an industry that does not yet exist calls for
strategies very different from those used for penetrating a predefined and well-structured market. Wedgwood's success called for an awareness of the revolutionary new concept of "social
mobility" in eighteenth-century England and the
understanding that pots and vases can be symbols of people's aspirations in this regard
(Koehn, 1997), Transforming the invention of a
light bulb into the electrification of entire cities
involved Edison's educating and convincing
thousands of people, including politicians,
priests, and the robber barons on Wall Street, to
fundamentally rethink their presumptions about
light and fire and science and safety (Baldwin,
1995), Jobs and Wozniak had to stumble on the
inventions of Xerox PARC and disprove the mar-

ket forecasts for computers at around 2,000 units

by the end of the twentieth century. And the
founders of Netscape and Amazon.com had to
demonstrate that revolutions were possible in
the IPO marketthat is, billion dollar companies could be created with virtually no sales
revenues and/or profits.
These endeavors that opened up new markets
and industries plugged into and exploited social and technological contingencies that could
not have been anticipated or planned for. Also,
they involved changing (not fulfilling), often on
a revolutionary scale, the perceptions and expectations of their stakeholders, customers and
investors alikea task that Schumpeter attributed to "creative destruction" when he observed,
"It was not enough to produce satisfactory soap,
it was also necessary to induce people to wash"
(Schumpeter, 1939: 243). Processes of causation
are not much use on the cusps of such catastrophic changes in the economy as the births
and deaths of industries, A historic analysis of
companies that pioneered such changes and a
comparison of the commonalities in the decision
processes used by the entrepreneurs who created those companies should provide evidence
for the following claim.
,
< ..
Proposition 2: Successful early en- .._
trants in a new industry are more
likely to have used effectuation processes than causation processes. With
later entrants, the trend could be reversed.
At the Level of the Firm

Researchers trying to understand success and

failure factors in new ventures time and again
have proposed longitudinal studies as the most
effective method to understand them and to develop predictions for separating potential winners from losers. Again, attempts at such longitudinal studies have not provided brilliant
illuminations (Van de Ven, PoUey, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1999). Reasons include, among other
things, the difficulties in comparing firms across
industries, technologies, and geographical factors. The theory of effectuation opens up possibilities for true comparisons across such diverse
factors. Since all new firms and entrepreneurs,
irrespective of which industry or environment
they are operating in, make decisions, and since

2001

Sarasvathy

their decisions can clearly be classified into the

two categories of causation and effectuation (using the four contrasting principles listed earlier),
longitudinal studies can be used to compare
them on this one dimension, with a view to separating potential successes and failures. For example, this leads to the following conjecture.
Proposifion 3; Successful firms, in their
early stages, are more likely to have
focused on forming alliances and
-.;; partnerships than on other types of
'' competitive strategies, such as sophisticated market research and competitive analyses, long-term planning and
forecasting, and formal management
practices in recruitment and training
"
of employees.
Within the FirmAt the Level of
Founders/Decision Makers
In addition to carefully separating their anatomical structures, I have clearly delineated four
principles on which effectuation processes can
be contrasted with causation models in individual decision making. Yet a lot remains to be
done in terms of identifying and categorizing
particular decisions in particular functional
areas inside firms. Methods such as grounded
theory building using case studies and qualitative analyses of detailed decision-making experiments might be required to accomplish this
empirical objective. As a first step in that direction, I offer the following conjectures.
Conjecture 1: In marketing decisions,
in contrast to traditional decision
makers, effectuators are less likely to
' use traditional types of market research, such as carefully designed
surveys and test marketing; instead,
they are likely to dive straight into
seat-of-the-pants
marketing/selling
activities and alliances.
Conjecture 2: In financial decisions, in
contrast to traditional decision makers, effectuators are less likely to use
long-term planning or net present
value (NPV) analyses: instead, they
are likely to be focused on the short
term and, at most, to use informal versions of real options.

261

Conjecture 3: In organizational decisions, in contrast to traditional decision makers, effectuators are more
likely to build strong participatory
cultures, rather than hierarchical, procedures-based ones. In fact, in contrast to traditional decision makers,
effectuators are likely to be less effective in running large organizations
with well-oiled procedures.
Conjecture 4: Effectuators are more
likely to fail more often but are also
more likely to manage the failures
more effectively and to create larger,
more successful firms in the long run
(although they may need fo hire professional chief operating officers to
actually run them!).

CONTINGENT ASPIRATIONS AND THE

ENTREPRENEURIAL IMAGINATION

Economics and management have long rested

on primitives, such as "product" and "market,"
and on institutions, such as "firm," "industry,"
and "economy." But these concepts and institutions are artifacts that begin as gleams in the
eyes of individuals. Values get created in every
sphere of human endeavor, from the arts and
sciences to sports and philosophy. These fruits
of the human imagination may be used in a
variety of ways to fulfill human aspirations. The
possible uses and the breadth of their dissemination are limited only by the economic ingenuity of the entrepreneurs who create the artifacts
that transform the fruits of human imagination
into goods and services for truck and trade.
Before there are products, there is human
imagination, and before there is a market, there
are human aspirations. Successful entrepreneurs have long created firms, industries, and
even economies by matching up the offspring of
human imagination with human aspirations.
They have realized that this matching does not
occur spontaneously or "inevitably." Rather, the
creation of economic artifacts demands imagination, inspiration, and protracted endeavor
both cooperative and competitive.
In fact, in mainstream economics, researchers
have thus far explained entrepreneurship not as
the creation of artifacts by imaginative actors
fashioning purpose and meaning out of contin-

Academy of Management Review

gent endowments and endeavors but as the inevitable outcome of mindless "forces," stochastic processes, or environmental selection. The
essential agent of economics is a rational actor,
upon whom a monolithic telos is usually imposed by the economist, whether it is utility/
profit maximization at the micro level or welfare
maximization at the level of the economy. The
essential agent of entrepreneurship, as I argue
here, however, is an effectuator: an imaginative
actor who seizes contingent opportunities and
exploits any and all means at hand to fulfill a
plurality of current and future aspirations, many
of which are shaped and created through the
very process of economic decision making and
are not given a priori.
Human imagination and human aspirations
influence each other and reshape one another
continually, both directly and through economic
artifacts. The swirls and eddies these interactions engender often change the shoreline and
make the waters treacherous for economic ship
builders and navigators. That is why destinations as well as paths are often unclear in economic decision making. And when destinations
are unclear and there are no preexistent goals,
causal road maps are less useful than effectual
exchanges of information between all stakeholders involved in the journey. Bold expeditions and even one-eyed pirates rule such seas,
and voyages to India effectually end up in the
Americas.
REFERENCES
Allison, G. T. 1969. Conceptual models and the Cuban missile crisis. American Political Science Review, 63: 689718.

April

Burt, R. S. 1992. Structural holes; The social structure of competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dickson, P. R., & Giglierano, J. J. 1986. Missing the boat and
sinking the boat: A conceptual model of entrepreneurial
risk. Joumal of Marketing, 50(3): 58-71.
Ehringer, A. G. 1995. MaJte up your mind: Entrepreneurs talk
about decision making. Los Angeles: Silver-Lake Publishing.
Einhom, H. J., & Hogarth, R. M. 1981. Behavioral decision
theory: Processes of judgment and choice. Annuai Review of Psychology, 32: 53-88.
Eisenhardt, K. M. 1989. Making fast strategic decisions in
high-velocity environments. Academy of Management
JoumaL 32: 542-576.
EUsberg, D. 1961. Risk, ambiguity, and the Savage axioms.
Quarterly Joumal of Economics, 75: 643-669.
Focardi, S., & Jonas, C. 1998. Risi management: Framework,
methods, and practice. New Hope, PA: Frank J. Fabozzi
Associates.
Gartner, W. B. 1988. Who is an entrepreneur is the wrong
question. American /ournal of Small Business, 12(4): 1132.
Gersick, C. J. G. 1992. Time and transition in my work on
teams: Looking back on a new model of group development. In P. J. Frost & R. E. Stablein (Eds.), Doing exemplary research: 52-64. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Getzels, J. W., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1976. The creative
vision: A longitudinal study of problem finding in art.
New York: Wiley.
Gigerenzer, G., Hell, W., & Blank H. 1988. Presentation and
content: The use of base rates as a continuous variable.
Joumal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception
and Performance, 14: 513-525.
Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. 1999. The recognition heuristic: How ignorance makes us smart. In G. Gigerenzer,
P. M. Todd, & ABC Research Group (Eds.), Simple heuristics that make us smart: 37-58. New York: Oxford University Press.

Baldwin, N. 1995. Edison: Inventing the csntury. New York:

Hyperion.

Henderson, A. D. 1999. Firm strategy and age dependence: A

contingent view of the liabilities of newness, adolescence, and obsolescence. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44: 281-314.

Bar-Hillel, M. 1980. The base-rate fallacy in probability judgments. Acta PsychoJogica. 44: 211-233.

Hogarth, R. M., & Makridakis, S. 1981. Forecasting and planning: An evaluation. Management Science, 1: 115-138.

Barney, J. 1991. Firm resources and sustained competitive

advantage. Journal of Management, 17: 99-121.

James, W. 1912. The experience of activity. In Essays in radical empiricism: 155-189. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.

Birch, D. L. 1987. Job creation in America: How our smallest

companies put the most people to work. New York: Free
Press.
Borges, B., Goldstein, D. G., Ortmann, A., & Gigerenzer, G.
1999. Can ignorance beat the stock market? In G. Gigerenzer, P. M. Todd, & ABC Research Group (Eds.), Simpie heuristics that make us smart: 59-72. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buchanan, J. M., & Vanberg, V. J. 1991. The market as a
creative process. Economics and Philosophy, 7: 167-186.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. 1990. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica. 47: 263-292.
Kamien, M. 1994. Entrepreneurship: What is it? Business
Week Executive Briefing Service, 7: 1-24.
Knight, F. H. 1921. Risk, uncertainty and profit. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Koehn, N. F. 1997. Josiah Wedgwood and the first industrial
revolution. In T. K. McCraw (Ed.), Creating modern cap-

aooi

Sarasvathy

263

ifaiism: 17-48. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

I>ress.

Rosen, R. 1991. Life itself. New York: Columbia University

Press.

Kotler, P. 1991. Marlrefing management. Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Sarasvathy, S. D. 2000. Report on the seminar on research

perspectives in entrepreneurship. Joumal of Business
Venturing, 15: 1-57.

Kulkarni, D., & Simon, H. A. 1986. The processes of scientific

discovery: The strategy of experimentation. Cognitive
Science, 12: 139-175.
Lindblom, C. E. 1959. The science of muddling through. Pubiic Administration fieview, 19: 79-88.
Lumpkin, G. T., & Dess, G. G. Clarifying the entrepreneurial
orientation construct and linking it to performance.
Academy of Management Review, 21: 135-173.
MacCrimmon, K. R., Wehrung, D. A., & Stanbury, W. T. 1986.
Taking risks: The management of uncertainty. New York:
Collier Macmillan.
Mackie, J. L. 1998. Causes and conditions. In E. Sosa &
M. Tooley (Eds.), Causation: 33-55. New York: Oxford
University Press.
March, J. G. 1982. The technology of foolishness. In J. G.
March & J. P. Olsen (Eds.), Ambiguity and choice in
organizations: 69-81. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.

Sarasvathy, S. D., & Simon, H. A. 2000. Effectuation, near

decomposaJbiiity, and the growth of entrepreneuriaJ
firms. Paper presented at the first annual Technology
Entrepreneurship Research Policy Conference, University of Maryland, College Park.
Schumpeter, J. A. 1939. Business cycles: A theoretical, historical, and statistical analysis of the capitalist process.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schwenk, C. R. 1988. The essence of strategic decision making. New York: Free Press.
Schwenk, C. R., & Shrader, C. B. 1993. Effects of formal strategic planning on financial performance in small firms:
A meta-analysis. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice,
17(3): 53-64.
Shane, S. 1995. Is the independent entrepreneurial firm a
valuable organizational form? Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings: 110-115.

March, J. G. 1991. Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organizafion Science, 2: 71-87.

Shapira, Z. B. (Ed.). 1997. Organizationa] decision making.

New York: Cambridge University Press.

March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. 1958. Organizations. New York:

Wiley.
Mintzberg, H. 1991. Learning 1, planning 0. Strategic Management JoumaL 12: 463-466.

Silver, D. A. 1985. Entrepreneuriai megabucks. New York:

Wiley.
Simon, H. A. 1959. Theories of decision making in economics
and behavioral science. American Economic Review, 49:
253-283.

Mintzberg, H. 1994. The rise and fall of strategic planning.

New York: Free Press.
Moorman, C, & Miner, A. S. 1998. Organizational improvisation and organizational memory. Academy of Management Review, 23: 698-723.
Nystrom, P. C, & Starbuck, W. H. (Eds.). 1981. Handbooi of
organizational design. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Palich, L. E. & Bagby, D. R. 1995. Using cognitive theory to
explain entrepreneurial risk-taking: Challenging conventional wisdom. Joumal of Business Venturing, 10:
425-439.
Payne, J. W., Bettman, J. R., & Johnson, E. J. 1993. The adaptive
decision maker. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Peirce, C. S. 1878. How to make our ideas clear. Popular
Science Monthly, 12: 286-302.
Polanyi, M. 1963. The potential theory of adsorption: Authority in science has its uses and its dangers. Science, 141:
1010-1013.
Porter, M. E. 1980. Competitive strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors. New York: Free Press.

Simon, H. A. 1996. Sciences of fhe arfificial. (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Taylor, R. N. 1984. Behaviorai decision making. Glenview, IL:
Scott, Foresman.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. 1982. Judgment and uncertainty:
Heuristics and biases. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, &
A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: 3-20. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Van de Ven, A., PoUey, D. E., Garud, R., & Venkataraman, S.
1999. The innovation journey. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vickers, G. 1965. Tiie arf of judgment. New York: Basic Books.
Weick, K. E. 1979. The social psychology of organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Weick, K. E. 1995. Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Weick, K. E. 1999. That's moving: Theories that matter, /ournai of iVIanagemenf Inquiry, 8: 134-142.
Zey, M. 1998. fiafionai choice theory and organizational theory: A critique. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Saras D. Sarasvathy is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of

Washington. She received her Ph.D. from Camegie Mellon University. Her research
involves developing the theory of effectuation through in-depth studies of entrepreneurial decision making and exploring its connections with value creation, new
venture performance, and the philosophy of pragmatism.