We develop a theoretical perspective on how the increasing data availability in the digital age affects firms’ strategic decisions. Specifically, we explore whether, and under which conditions, external experts’ collective assessment of product-technology domains impacts firms’ allocation of capital to their strategic business units engaged in these domains. Drawing on decision comprehensiveness theory, we propose that such expert sentiment has informational value for capital allocation decisions, and that this value is contingent on the available information’s determinacy and quantity. We find evidence for our propositions by studying 669 capital allocation decisions made by 85 pharmaceutical firms from 2005 to 2016, and by using supervised machine learning classifiers to analyse expert sentiment in almost 250,000 articles. Our study contributes to the behavioural theory of the firm by showing that, contrary to what scholars traditionally assume, decision makers broaden, rather than narrow, their information processing in comprehensive information environments.

中文翻译：

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数字时代的战略决策：专家情绪与企业资本配置

我们就数字时代日益增长的数据可用性如何影响公司的战略决策提出了理论观点。具体而言，我们探讨了外部专家对产品技术领域的集体评估是否以及在何种条件下影响公司对其从事这些领域的战略业务部门的资本分配。借鉴决策全面性理论，我们提出这种专家情绪对资本配置决策具有信息价值，并且该价值取决于可用信息的确定性和数量。我们通过研究 2005 年至 2016 年 85 家制药公司做出的 669 项资本分配决策，并使用监督机器学习分类器分析近 250,000 篇文章中的专家情绪，为我们的命题找到证据。