The Division of Gains from Complementarities in Human-Capital-Intensive Activity

The authors thank the senior editor, two anonymous reviewers, Gautam Ahuja, Bharat Anand, Arturs Kalnins, Phanish Puranam, Jan Rivkin, Jim Westphal, Charles Williams, seminar participants at the University of Michigan, and reviewers for the 2008 Academy of Management Annual Meeting for helpful comments and suggestions. They also thank Bridget McCarthy and Xin Hu for excellent research assistance, Laura Berdish for help with finding data on NBA free agents, and Minyuan Zhao for providing the MSA population data. The authors thank Alan Ostfield, then COO of the Detroit Pistons NBA franchise, for sharing his insights on the organization and management of professional basketball teams when they began this study. S. Ethiraj gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Mike R. and Mary Kay Hallman fellowship. A longer version of this article, with a more detailed description of the methods and supplementary analyses and tables, is available on SSRN (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=356786). Last, but not least, Erin Lee Martin provided excellent editorial assistance in shortening the paper without loss of clarity. All errors and omissions remain the authors' own.