Retrospective explanations of past events encourage academics to overstate the contributions of executives and the benefits of accurate perceptions or careful analyses. Because retrospective analyses oversimplify the connections between behaviors and outcomes, prescriptions derived from...

The Challenger disaster illustrates the effects of repeated successes, gradual acclimatization, and the differing responsibilities of engineers and managers. Past successes and acclimatization alter decision-makers' beliefs about probabilities of future success. Fine-tuning processes result from...

Most work in strategy and organization theory assumes that performance feedback is straightforward to interpret and truthfully reported. We raise the following question: How might the systematic distortion of negative performance information affect organizational learning and future performance?...