We investigate the mechanisms that shape social comparison in organizations and generate social comparison costs. Drawing on the notions of inequity aversion and envy, we argue that heterogeneity in the strength and type of incentives provides an impetus for envy, and that the resulting social...

In this paper, we develop and test a behavioral theory of lost leadership. Using insights from the literature on goals as reference points and prospect theory, we predict that former leaders exert more effort compared to otherwise identical competitors. We test this prediction using two...

We study organizational search in the presence of intuitive biases. Drawing from work on the psychology of human decision making, we construe biases as unjustified preferences that arise due to automatic, spontaneous thinking. This property of decision making gives rise to a mechanism we label...