Organization Science articles from May 2007

Organization Science archives from May 2007

A behavioral theory of the firm--40 years and counting: introduction and impact.
May 1, 2007... In this introductory piece, we take stock of the impact of Cyert and March's A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, describe current research trends in the behavioral tradition, and introduce the special issue's papers. A Behavioral Theory of the...

Incentives to cheat: the influence of executive compensation and firm performance on financial misrepresentation.
May 1, 2007... Despite the many undesirable outcomes of corporate misconduct, scholars have an inadequate understanding of corporate misconduct's causes and mechanisms. We extend the behavioral theory of the firm, which traditionally assumes away the...

Aspiration performance and railroads' patterns of learning from train wrecks and crashes.
May 1, 2007... We link two influential organizational learning models--performance feedback and experiential learning--to advance hypotheses that help explain how organizations' learning from their own and others' experience is conditioned by their...

Antecedents of convergence and divergence in strategic positioning: the effects of performance and aspiration on the direction of strategic change.
May 1, 2007... This paper investigates drivers of convergence and divergence in strategic positioning in terms of resource-allocation decisions. The study, based on the behavioral theory of the firm, suggests two unexplored kinked-curve relationships between...

The value of moderate obsession: insights from a new model of organizational search.
May 1, 2007... This study presents a new model of search on a rugged landscape, which employs modeling techniques from fractal geometry rather than the now-familiar NK-modeling technique. In our simulations, firms search locally in a two-dimensional fitness...

On the origin of strategy: action and cognition over time.
May 1, 2007... We develop a perspective on how managers search for a strategy. In the spirit of Cyert and March (1963), we aim for a perspective that reflects the reality of managerial behavior, that respects both the reasoning power of managers and the...

What competition? Myopic self-focus in market-entry decisions.
May 1, 2007... This paper documents egocentric biases in market-entry decisions. We demonstrate self-focused explanations for entry decisions made by three groups of participants: actual entrepreneurs (founders), working professionals who considered starting...

The inherent limits of organizational structure and the unfulfilled role of hierarchy: lessons from a near-war.
May 1, 2007... This paper examines how Greece nearly went to war with Turkey in 1996 over the uninhabited islets of Imia, to the detriment of the Greek decision makers involved. This escalation was driven by fragmented, piecemeal reactions resulting from the...

A behavioral resource-based view of the firm: the synergy of Cyert and March (1963) and Penrose (1959).
May 1, 2007... Cyert and March's (1963) seminal behavioral theory is one of the two major economics-based theories of the firm that goes inside the "black box" (the firm)--the other being the contribution of Edith Penrose. The two theories have differences,...

On the evolutionary and behavioral theories of organizations: a tentative roadmap.(PERSPECTIVE)
May 1, 2007... Cyert and March's A Behavioral Theory of the Firm has been acknowledged as one of the most fundamental pillars on which evolutionary theorizing in economics is built. Nelson and Winter's 1982 book is pervaded by the philosophy and concepts...

Administrative behavior: laying the foundations for Cyert and March.(PERSPECTIVE)
May 1, 2007... A Behavioral Theory of the Firm by Cyert and March (1963) can be interpreted as a culmination of new intellectual directions in the study of organization that began with Herbert Simon's Administrative Behavior (1947). This essay shows how Simon...

Historical roots of the a behavioral theory of the firm model at GSIA.(PERSPECTIVE)
May 1, 2007... Richard Cyert and James March's (1963) A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (ABTOF) is one of the most influential works in organization science. An important element of that work was a computational model of a duopoly, which was arguably the first...

Neo-Carnegie: the Carnegie School's past, present, and reconstructing for the future.(PERSPECTIVE)
May 1, 2007... Cyert and March's (1963) A Behavioral Theory of the Firm and the broader Carnegie School form critical theoretical underpinnings for modern organization studies. Despite its impact, however, we suggest that researchers who rely on the Carnegie...

Scholarship, scholarly institutions, and scholarly communities.(PERSPECTIVE)
May 1, 2007... Scholarship is less an individual than a collective activity. The history of A Behavioral Theory of the Firm illustrates two key aspects of the collective nature of scholarship. The first aspect is the dependence of scholarship on the...