Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

Faced with institutional demands, organizations often create departments whose work is divorced from technical imperatives. This paper examines workers in one such department: Human Resources. Analysis of HR’s recent history and evidence from an ethnographic study of HR work highlight the...

Research on buyer-supplier relationships has debated the advantages and disadvantages of embedded relationships. We join this debate by developing theory on the performance implications of relaxing embedded buyer-supplier relationships for a limited period of time — a previously neglected...

The paper examines the allocation of inventive effort in complex product systems. I argue that complex product systems (e.g., personal computers) are distinguished by functional interaction among several components each guided by a relatively autonomous bundle of technical and economic...

The authors present an analytical framework for bank complexity through the hypothesis that complexity is necessary for banks to stay viable in the evolving industry of financial intermediation. They look at organizational structures of bank holding companies gauged by the number and types of...

This study investigates estimation errors due to hidden costs — the costs of implementation that are neglected in strategic decision-making processes — in the context of services offshoring. Based on data from the Offshoring Research Network, we find that decision makers are more likely to...