In this research we extend theoretical development about decision making in organizations in which many kinds of errors cannot be tolerated. Catastrophic consequences can be associated with faulty decision making in reliability-seeking organizations, a situation which does not occur in most...

A laboratory study examined effects of friendship on expectations of pricing in personal business transactions. Friends expect to pay more but charge less for a variety of commodities than do strangers. Remarkably, without discussion, friends agree on prices for commodities, whereas strangers do...

Social norms constrain people's behaviors in transactions, but such norms are rarely investigated. Script theory provides a coherent, holistic structure for understanding socially mediated behaviors. This study proposes terms of a script for the pricing behavior of transactors when friendship is...

Research on the distribution of resources typically focuses on anticipated outcomes. This paper investigates the social norms people use to distribute adventitious (unanticipated) outcomes. Participants in this study read a scenario where either they, or the person they were with (an...