Most explanations of social influence focus on why individuals might want to agree with the opinions or attitudes of others. The authors propose a different explanation that assumes the attitudes of others influence only the activities and objects individuals are exposed to. For example,...

To what extent are our decision-making and learning processes influenced indirectly by others?

The observed association between performance and organizational risk taking has usually been attributed to the influence of performance on risk preferences. Here I show how a simple model of adaptation, which only assumes that organizations avoid activities with poor past performance, can...

Most studies in organization theory are retrospective and rely on historical data. Because more data are available about widely diffused practices or about large populations, studies typically focus on these. Using simulation, we demonstrate that such selective sampling of empirical settings has...

Individuals tend to select again alternatives about which they have positive impressions and to avoid alternatives about which they have negative impressions. Here we show how this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process leads to the emergence of an illusory...

Individuals are typically more likely to repeatedly select alternatives they have a positive impression of. This paper shows that this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process might lead to the emergence of illusory correlation between attributes of multi-attribute...

Recent research has argued that several well-known judgment biases may be due to biases in the available information sample rather than to biased information processing. Most of these sample-based explanations assume that decision makers are “naive”: They are not aware of the biases in the...

Successfully predicting that something will become a big hit seems impressive. Managers and entrepreneurs who have made successful predictions and have invested money on this basis are promoted, become rich, and may end up on the cover of business magazines. In this paper, we show that an...

Performance sampling models of duration dependence in employee turnover and firm exit predict that hazard rates will initially be low, gradually rise to a maximum, and then fall. Some empirical duration distributions have bimodal hazard rates, however. In this paper, we present a generalization...