Organization theory highlights the spread of norms of rationality in contemporary life. Yet rationality does not always spread without friction; individuals often act based on other beliefs and norms. We explore this problem in the context of restaurants and diners. We argue that consumers...

Researchers commonly use co-occurrence counts to assess the similarity of objects. This paper illustrates how traditional association measures can lead to misguided significance tests of co-occurrence in settings where the usual multinomial sampling assumptions do not hold. I propose a Monte...

A general finding in economic and organizational sociology states that producers and products that span categories lose appeal to audiences. This paper argues that to assess the consequences of category spanning researchers need to take account of the relations among the categories spanned. We...

In 1999, the International Volleyball Federation (IVF) changed the scoring system of volleyball, from the side-out scoring system to the rally scoring system. The main goal of the scoring system change was to make the length of the game more predictable. This short paper investigates whether the...

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and...

We study how tape drive producers respond to the almost continuous emergence of new drive formats across the technology's history. The analysis characterizes the technological formats of tape drives according to their degree of contrast (distinctiveness and visibility) from other formats. High...