The relation between performance and ability is a central concern in discussions of imitation and learning - should we imitate and learn from the highest performers? Past research has illustrated how social mechanisms, combined with noise, can produce a weak or even non-existent association...

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...