In Search of Contrarian Opportunities from the Blind Spot of Majority Rule

Superior profit usually depends on capturing opportunities that rivals fail to identify or utilize. A key challenge for strategists is how to be both different and viable. Prior research has tended to associate contrarian opportunities with rivals’ behavioral failures. Herein, we argue that contrarian opportunities can emerge endogenously in an ecology whenever there is a dominant logic. We develop our argument in the context of organizational design, in which the majority voting rule is demonstrated to be an efficient and typically mainstream approach for screening alternatives. We formally demonstrate when antimajority—an unconventional screening rule where acceptance depends on the minority’s approval and majority’s disapproval—exploits the opportunities left behind by the majority rule. We illustrate how a contrarian niche emerges, and its scope conditions using the case of an antimajority voting venture capitalist firm together with an evolutionary model of competing rules. More generally, a contrarian niche emerges not necessarily because the dominant firms have been suboptimal or inefficient but because their homogeneity predicts an exploitable blind spot, preserving opportunities for strategists who can afford to be contrary.