Can managers have an impact on their firm that goes beyond their direct actions and decisions? This article shows that a manager with strong beliefs about the right course of action will attract, through sorting in the labor market, employees with similar beliefs. This alignment of beliefs gives...

Rational agents with differing priors tend to be overoptimistic about their chances of success. In particular, an agent who tries to choose the action that is most likely to succeed, is more likely to choose an action of which he overestimated, rather than underestimated, the likelihood of...

We study how firms can use a knowledge management system to optimally leverage employee-generated know-how. In particular, we consider the following practical strategic questions for the manager of a knowledge-intensive firm: Should her firm develop a formal knowledge system? And if so, how...

This paper derives two mechanisms through which Bayesian-rational individuals with differing priors will tend to be relatively overconfident about their estimates and predictions, in the sense of overestimating the precision of these estimates. The intuition behind one mechanism is slightly...

This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm's centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give the manager, as an equilibrium outcome, interpersonal authority over employees (in a world with open disagreement). The paper thus provides micro-foundations for the idea that...

This article shows how corporate culture, in the sense of shared beliefs and values, originates (often unintentionally) through screening, self-sorting, and manager-directed joint learning. It shows that such culture will be stronger among more important employees and in older and more...

This article studies the allocation of control when there is disagreement--in the sense of differing priors--about the right course of action. People then value control rights since they believe that their decisions are better than those of others. More disagreement (due to, e.g., fundamental...

This paper studies, in a world with differing priors, the role of organizational beliefs and managerial vision in the behavior and performance of corporations. The paper defines vision operationally as a very strong belief by the manager about the right course of action for the firm. The...

What makes a decision strategic? When is strategy most important? This paper studies the structure and value of strategy (in its everyday sense), starting from a (functional) definition of strategy as 'the smallest set of (core) choices to optimally guide the other choices.' This definition...