Reconsidering the Strategic Implications of Decision Comprehensiveness

A key question in strategy is whether comprehensiveness enables firms to make better strategic decisions in various environments. This article identifies two problems hindering efforts to answer this question: 1. Past studies have generally theorized about a different dependent variable than they have measured. 2. Past studies have conflated the concepts of uncertainty, ambiguity, and instability in accounting for environmental moderation. The paper reframes the question and proposes ways of characterizing organizational information environments so researchers can identify more precisely those real-world contexts across which the value of comprehensiveness varies.