Most explanations of social influence focus on why individuals might want to agree with the opinions or attitudes of others. The authors propose a different explanation that assumes the attitudes of others influence only the activities and objects individuals are exposed to. For example,...

Individuals tend to select again alternatives about which they have positive impressions and to avoid alternatives about which they have negative impressions. Here we show how this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process leads to the emergence of an illusory...

Individuals are typically more likely to repeatedly select alternatives they have a positive impression of. This paper shows that this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process might lead to the emergence of illusory correlation between attributes of multi-attribute...

Recent research has argued that several well-known judgment biases may be due to biases in the available information sample rather than to biased information processing. Most of these sample-based explanations assume that decision makers are “naive”: They are not aware of the biases in the...

As emphasized by Barney (1986), any explanation of superior profitability must account for why the resources supporting such profitability could have been acquired for a price below their rent-generating capacity. Building upon the literature iti economics on coordination failures and incomplete...

Organizations learn from other organizations. However, the observations available to them are typically a biased sample. The organizations that can be observed at any point in lime are the survivors of a selective process that has eliminated a large fraction of the underlying population. In...

Individuals and social systems are often portrayed as risk averse and resistant to change. Such propensities are characteristically attributed to individual, organizational, and cultural traits such as risk aversion, uncertainty-avoidance, discounting, and an unwillingness to change. This paper...

A typical argument in Marxist and radical writings on economic organization is that prevailing practices, rather than being the most efficient, have been adopted in order to increase the share of the surplus of capitalists. Using an incomplete contract approach, this article develops a model...

To find the secrets of business success, what could be more natural than studying successful businesses? In fact, nothing could be more dangerous, warns this Stanford professor. Generalizing from the examples of successful companies is like generalizing about New England weather from data taken...

Popular discourse as well as several recent academic theories view high performance as a signal of capability. Although it is reasonable to believe that more capable firms will achieve higher performance, several other factors influence firm performance, including luck. As a result, high...