Ce travail se concentre sur l'idée que la rationalité organisationnelle est limitée: les décideurs recherchent des solutions offrant un minimum de satisfaction et pensent d’une manière qui est typique pour l'homme. La thèse explore cette interaction entre le processus de recherche organisationnelle et la cognition des décideurs et démontre que certains biais (distorsions) dans les aspects caractéristiques de notre pensée peuvent être des instruments de stratégie comportementale.Comme le point de départ, je complète le premier primitif de la rationalité limitée, i.e. la génération et l'évaluation d’alternatives, avec des éléments intégrés de la cognition humaine, tels que la pensée intuitive, spécifiquement l’heuristique d’affect, et des représentations mentales imparfaites. À l'aide de modèles de calcul, j’étudie les effets des biais correspondants à ces éléments de la cognition humaine (préférences affectives et erreurs systématiques dans les représentations mentales) dans le temps lorsque des organisations s'adaptent à des environnements complexes. Cela me permet d'identifier les cycles de vie des éléments de la cognition humaine et de montrer que les organisations devraient gérer (plutôt que d'éliminer) certains biais. Enfin, je fais des propositions et je teste empiriquement un sous-ensemble de mes prédictions.En conclusion, ce travail vise à faire progresser la théorie émergente de la stratégie comportementale en considérant conjointement différents primitifs de la rationalité limitée et en les intégrant aux connaissances existantes en sciences organisationnelles. Une question générale qui motive ce travail est la façon dont les organisations peuvent gérer les nombreuses limites de la rationalité humaine. / This work centers on the tenet that organizational rationality is bounded: decision makers search, satisfice, and think in the way that is typical (in its integrity) only of humans. The dissertation explores this interplay between search and decision maker’s cognition and demonstrates how biases in characteristic aspects of our thinking can be instruments of behavioral strategy.As a starting point, I take search, sequential generation and evaluation of alternatives, as the first primitive of bounded rationality and complement it with integral elements of human cognition, such as automatic, intuitive thinking, specifically affect heuristic, and imperfect mental representations of reality. With the help of computational models, I track the effects of the corresponding biases (systematic affective preferences and systematic errors in mental representations) over time as organizations adapt to complex environments. This allows me to identify life cycles of the elements of human cognition and show that organizations should manage (rather than eliminate) some biases over time. Finally, I derive predictions and empirically test a subset of my propositions.In conclusion, this work aims to advance the emerging theory of behavioral strategy by jointly considering different primitives of bounded rationality and integrating them with the existing knowledge in organization sciences. A broad question that motivates this work is how organizations can manage the many bounds to human rationality.

Organizations increasingly engage in launching new products, but they show heterogeneous decision-making patterns in new product strategies. This dissertation attempts to study the source of organizational heterogeneity in new product introductions (NPIs) by applying behavioral perspectives. To this end, this dissertation examines how organizations respond to the conditions of themselves and others through various decisions on new product introductions. I propose that organizations learn directly from their own experience that is relative to their own historical experience and their peers’ experience (i.e., performance feedback) and respond to it by jointly combining different aspects of NPIs such as NPI exploration and speed. Highlighting the perspectives of external actors, I also postulate that when organizations learn vicariously from their peers’ experience is contingent on the characteristics of peers and industry that are sending different signals to observing entities, such as external actors. Through three essays, I examine these ideas in the U.S. movie industry where movie studios rely on performance feedback and the conditions of others to make subsequent movie decisions.At the heart of this dissertation is the notion that organizations learn from their experience or experience of others by collecting performance information, interpreting it, and changing their NPI activities. This dissertation responds to an important call of Gavetti, Greve, Levinthala, & Ocasio (2012) for research in the cognitive aspects in decision making and the dynamics of interacting behavioral entities—organizations and institutional environments (e.g., peer organizations and investors)—filling important gaps in the literature and hence advancing our understanding of why, when, and which NPI decisions are adopted. / Business Administration/Strategic Management

Extant research within competitive dynamics recognizes a positive relationship between high levels of competitive activity and firm performance, but the cognitive and psychological antecedents to competitive activity are far less clearly understood. I explore the role of a specific psychological antecedent - status, in impacting firms’ motivations to launch competitive moves against rivals. The key question, which extant literature does not seem fully equipped to answer, is when and under exactly what circumstances lower-status firms become motivated to launch action against higher-status ones and vice-versa. I use the stimulus-response model in social cognition to build theory which helps to answer the question by considering structural properties of market engagement. The specific structural property of market engagement that I focus on is market commonality, or the extent to which a rival is a significant player in markets important to a focal firm. I predict that a rival’s market commonality with a focal firm and its status relative to the focal firm have independent and positive effects on the extent to which the focal firm pays attention to the rival, that a rival’s market commonality with a focal firm and its status relative to the focal firm interact negatively to predict the focal firm’s motivation to launch action against that rival, and that a rival’s relative status and market commonality with a focal firm interact positively to predict the extent to which the focal firm pays attention to the rival. I test theory through a field study on gourmet food trucks in Lexington and an experiment through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk tool. Results provide broad support for the hypotheses. Three consequences follow from my study – that high-status firms are likely to come under attack from lower-status firms with whom they do not compete in markets, that they are unlikely to be paying attention to those lower-status firms when first attacked, and that they are likely to become aware of and motivated to act against those lower-status firms only after the lower-status firms have occupied key markets. My study contributes to the literatures in competitive dynamics, status, multi-market contact, and entrepreneurial action.

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Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-06-07T13:56:48Z No. of bitstreams: 1 isabelnetohastenreiter.pdf: 312777 bytes, checksum: c72248e87e64decb1255f12baae71e68 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-07-13T13:15:20Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 isabelnetohastenreiter.pdf: 312777 bytes, checksum: c72248e87e64decb1255f12baae71e68 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-13T13:15:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 isabelnetohastenreiter.pdf: 312777 bytes, checksum: c72248e87e64decb1255f12baae71e68 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-31 / (Novas perspectivas sobre a ocorrência do comportamento de caroneira). Durante o forrageamento de formigas cortadeiras pode-se observar operárias mínimas sobre os fragmentos de folha transportados até o ninho, comportamento denominado de caroneira. São citadas várias funções relacionadas a este comportamento, como defesa contra forídeos parasitoides, limpeza dos fragmentos de folhas, economia de energia de retono ao ninho, além de ingestão de seiva que exsuda do corte. Sendo assim, o presente estudo se apresenta como uma forma de elucidar questões ecológico-comportamentais de caroneira em Acromyrmex subterraneus, tendo por objetivos avaliar i) se as caroneiras ocorrem de forma aleatória ou dependente do fragmento vegetal transportado, ii) se a carga microbiana influencia a frequência de caroneiras e iii) como as caroneiras respondem a variações no tráfego de forrageamento. Para tanto, foram feitas manipulações nos fragmentos vegetais oferecidos e nas trilhas de forrageamento. No primeiro experimento verificou-se que caroneiras podem ocorrer em qualquer tamanho de fragmento ou espécie vegetal, mas há variação do tamanho da caroneira em função do fragmento. Tal fato demonstra alta plasticidade deste comportamento, de forma a ocorrer sobre os mais diversos substratos. No segundo experimento a presença de fungo entomopatogênico e antibióticos diminuiu a ocorrência de caroneiras, não sendo possível relacionar a frequência de caroneiras com a remoção de carga microbiana. Sugere-se que as caroneiras tenham evitado contato com os conídios fúngicos e com as soluções antimicrobianas porque eram substâncias desconhecidas pelas operárias. Já no terceiro experimento observou-se incremento da frequência de caroneiras em trilha estreita, com alta densidade de operárias. De fato, a frequência de caroneiras se correlacionou positivamente com o fluxo de operárias que deixavam o ninho nos três experimentos. Devido à alta frequência de encontros promovida pelo aumento do fluxo de operárias que saem do ninho e da densidade de operárias na trilha estreita sugere-se que o comportamento de caroneira é estimulado por esta taxa de encontros, que é agente regulatório de alocação de tarefas. O comportamento de caroneira pode ser considerado uma estratégia comportamental para redução do tráfego de operárias nas trilhas. / (New perspectives of hitchhiking behavior occurrence). During foraging of leafcutting ants, it can be observed minimal workers over leaf fragments, called hitchhikers. Many functions are cited as related with hitchhiking behavior, as defense against parasitoids, leaf cleaning, energy saving and sap feeding. Here, the objectives were to evaluate i) if hitchhiker occurrence is plant-size-species-dependent, ii) if microbial load influences hitchhiker frequency and iii) how hitchhiker frequency is influenced by high density of foraging traffic. It has been manipulated leaf fragments and foraging trails. In first experiment, it has been verified that hitchhikers could occur over any fragment size or plant species, but hitchhiker masses varied among plant species. In the second experiment, the entomopathogenic fungus and antibiotics reduced hitchhiker occurrence. Thus, it was not possible to relate hitchhiker frequency with microbial load removal. It has been suggested that hitchhikers avoid the conidia fungal and the antibiotic solutions due to these materials are unknown by workers. In the third experiment, hitchhiker frequency has been higher at narrow trails, which has greater worker density. Actually, hitchhiker frequency has been positively correlated with the outbound worker flow in the three experiments. Due to high head-on encounters promoted by the increased outbound worker flow and by the greater worker density in narrow trails, it has been suggested that hitchhiker behavior is stimulated by these encounters, which are regulatory agents of task allocation. The hitchhiker behavior could be considered a behavioral strategy to reduce worker traffic along foraging trails.

Against the theoretical background of evolutionary behavioral economics, this project analyzes bounded rationality and adaptive behaviour in organizational settings characterized by complexity and persistent uncertainty. In particular, drawing upon the standard NK model, two laboratory experiments investigate individual and collective decision-making in combinatorial problems of resource allocation featuring multiple dimensions and various levels of complexity. In the first study, investment horizons of different length are employed to induce a near or distant future temporal orientation, in order to assess the effects of complexity and time horizon on performance and search behaviour, examine the presence of a temporal midpoint heuristic, and inspect the moderating effects of deadline proximity on the performance-risk relationship. This is relevant for organizational science because the passage of time is essential to articulate many strategic practices, such as assessing progress, scheduling and coordinating task-related activities, discerning the processual dynamics of how these activities emerge, develop, and terminate, or interpreting retrospected, current, and anticipated events. A greater or lesser amount of time reflects then a greater or lesser provision of resources, thereby representing a constraint that can greatly affect the ability to maintain a competitive advantage or ensure organizational survival. In the second study, the accuracy of the imitative process is varied to induce a flawless or flawed information diffusion system and, congruently, an efficient or inefficient communication network, in order to assess the effects of complexity and parallel problem-solving on autonomous search behaviour, clarify the core drivers of imitative behaviour, control for the degree of strategic diversity under different communication networks, and evaluate individual as well as collective performance conditional to the interaction between the levels of complexity and the modalities of parallel problem-solving. This is relevant for organizational science because imitating the practices of high-performing actors is one of the key strategies employed by organizations to solve complex problems and improve their performance, thereby representing a major part of the competitive process. The project is intended to contribute grounding individual and collective behaviour in a more psychologically and socially informed decision-making, with a view to further the research agenda of behavioral strategy and sustain the paradigm shift towards an evolutionary-complexity approach to real economic structures.

Since James G. March introduced the concepts of exploration and exploitation in 1991, they have become ubiquitous in research on organizations and management. According to March (1991), exploration and exploitation are two sets of activities that allow systems (i.e., agents, either organizations or individuals) to adapt to their environment. On the one hand, exploitation activities are based on pre-existing knowledge, and consist of its implementation and/or refinement (e.g., production). On the other hand, exploration is based on knowledge that is not currently possessed by the system and, hence, refers to those activities that allow to acquire such new knowledge (e.g., search and experimentation). Scholars have produced a large number of contributions that have expanded our knowledge of exploration and exploitation even going beyond the initial boundaries of the field of organizational learning. Today, this large body of contributions that has developed over 30 years appears complex and divided into a plethora of research subfields (e.g., Almahendra and Ambos, 2015). Thus, research on exploration and exploitation has reached a level of conceptual and methodological sophistication that demands a high level of effort from researchers wishing to approach it. Among the multiple strands of emerging research, some scholars (such as Wilden et al., 2018) have recently begun to propose a return to the adoption of a behavioral approach to the study of exploration and exploitation. The earliest behavioral approach adopted in organizational studies is that of the "Carnegie School", which included Herbert Simon, Richard Cyert, and James March himself. Such an approach focuses the investigation of organizations on human behavior. In other words, adopting a behavioral approach involves studying organizations from the attitudes of their members, cognition, rationality, motivation, relationships, conflicts, and many other instances of psychological, economic, and social factors that influence human behavior (see, for example, March and Simon, 1958; Cyert and March, 1963). Today, this return to the behavioral approach is also associated with the "micro-foundations of strategy" movement (e.g., Felin et al., 2015) and so-called behavioral strategy (Powell et al., 2011). In essence, while the former is based on the importance of studying organizations and strategy by adopting a level of analysis below the collective/systemic (i.e., organizational) level, the latter includes all the elements that already characterized the behavioral approach (i.e., psychological, and social factors), reinforced by insights from the behavioral economics literature and the adoption of multiple methods, including experiments. This Doctoral dissertation enters this discussion and aims to investigate exploration and exploitation by adopting a behavioral approach, a "micro-foundational" perspective, and research methods that include laboratory experiments and computer simulations. The first study is a literature review paper with three purposes, each pursued in one of its three sections. First, it addresses the conceptual development of the exploration-exploitation literature that led to the emergence of the complex body of contributions mentioned above, providing a kind of "road map" of the research field based on the major literature reviews published over the past three decades. This is intended as a contribution towards researchers who want to take the first steps in the study of exploration-exploitation research. At the end of this road map, the paper by Wilden et al. (2018) is presented, linking the entire field of research to an emerging stream of research directed toward a return to James March's behavioral approach, enhanced by contributions in the areas of "micro-foundations" (e.g., Felin et al., 2015) and behavioral strategy (Powell et al., 2011). Second, based on the approach promoted in such research stream, a review of the literature on experimental studies of exploration and exploitation is provided. Laboratory experiments are considered key methods for advancing the study of exploration and exploitation by adopting a behavioral approach. Finally, the first essay is concluded with three suggested directions for further research: the improvement of existing conceptualizations through modeling, the further sophistication of existing experimental designs to capture features of managerial decision making that are currently beyond the scope of the state-of-the-art models underlying the mainly adopted experimental investigations, and the consideration of a multilevel approach to the study of individual exploration and exploitation, which consists of examining the variables that influence individual behavior at different organizational levels. The second study consists of an experimental investigation of the role of different sources of uncertainty on individual exploration-exploitation. It is based on the rationale underlying the third further research path proposed in the first study. Although an increasing adoption of laboratory experiments can be acknowledged in the research field, it is here argued that scholars have not experimentally disentangled the effects of two different types of uncertainty that emerge in the managerial and psychological literature, namely internal uncertainty, and external uncertainty. The former consists in the inability of individuals to predict future performance; while the latter results from the external environment and consists of unknown information about phenomena that may affect the final outcomes of a decision. The experimental design deployed in the study exposes a group of participants to the presence of the sole internal uncertainty, and a treatment group to the combined presence of the two sources. Findings show that the combined presence of these two sources of uncertainty may lead to the over-exploitation of initial routines, and, consequently, to the inability of individuals to exploit new opportunities stemming by alternatives discovered over time. Finally, the third study focuses on imitation, and exploration and exploitation, and builds on an agent-based model and computer simulations. This essay follows the first research trajectory suggested in the first study. While prominent research has defined imitation as a less costly alternative to experimentation (i.e., exploration), the possible role of imitation in the exploration-exploitation trade-off appears to be under-investigated. The interplay between imitation and exploration is rendered by the modeling of two types of agents: imitators and explorers. Differently from previous studies based on modeling, agent types are explicitly modeled as Simonian "satisficers". Experimentation is modeled as random search, whereas imitation builds on research on imitative heuristics. When engaging in adaptation in a competitive environment, both the types of agent experience "over-crowding" effects depending on the characteristics of their type. The paper concludes with the acknowledgement of limitations of the adopted model and proposes further investigation paths that include the calibration through experimental data.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-04T18:36:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Adilson Luis Giacomelli.pdf: 1037380 bytes, checksum: aa36e196bfaa0c849cd94bf8815dad7b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2003-12-16 / The proposal of an information management model is characterized as a capable way of supporting and directing the enterprise management system. For the study of this subject, it was chosen a sector of the Brazilian economy that was out of the patterns of the new products and businesses enterprises, classified as dot.com and, at the same time globalized, with high fluctuation of prices and demand, requiring integrated information. According to this, it is important to consider that the way of sustaining the basic columns of enterprise management, named statistical, economical and behavioral, needs supporting of the information management. In this way, some information models have been developed, according to the management techniques, to make possible a dynamic process for the maximization of the performance indicators of the organization. Nevertheless, in these models, it is considered that the communication of information is closely related to the individual performance and, therefore, related to the human subjectivity. Thus, the relationship between the information management and the segments of enterprise management systems, aligned with the strategy of the undertaking, incite competitive differential, assuring the increasingly improvement of the organization process. / A proposta de um modelo de gest?o da informa??o caracteriza-se como um meio capaz de sustentar e direcionar o sistema de gest?o empresarial. Para o estudo deste assunto, escolheu-se um setor da economia brasileira que estivesse fora dos padr?es das empresas de novos neg?cios e produtos, categorizados como dot.com, mas que, ao mesmo tempo, estivesse globalizado, com alta volatilidade de pre?os e demanda, por conseguinte, requerente de informa??es integradas. Diante disso, urge considerar que a forma de sustenta??o dos pilares b?sicos da gest?o empresarial, denominados como estat?sticos, econ?micos e comportamentais, necessita do apoio da gest?o da informa??o. Neste sentido, foram desenvolvidos alguns modelos informacionais que, em conformidade com as t?cnicas de gest?o, venham possibilitar um processo din?mico de maximiza??o dos indicadores de desempenho da organiza??o. Todavia, nestes modelos, considera-se que a comunica??o da informa??o est? condicionada ? atua??o de cada indiv?duo, portanto, associada ? subjetividade humana. Desta forma, a rela??o entre a gest?o da informa??o e os segmentos do sistema de gest?o empresarial, alinhados com a estrat?gia do empreendimento estimulam diferenciais competitivos, assegurando, assim, a melhoria cont?nua dos processos da organiza??o.

Les erreurs récurrentes et systématiques dans les processus de décision stratégique sont fréquentes ; et les théories actuelles des organisations sont insuffisantes pour les expliquer. La « Behavioral Strategy » suggère de lier ces erreurs à la psychologie des décideurs, et notamment à leurs biais cognitifs. Toutefois, cette vision suppose de connecter le niveau d’analyse de l’individu et celui de l’organisation. Nous proposons pour ce faire un niveau « méso », la routine de choix stratégique (RCS), où interagissent la psychologie des décideurs et les décisions stratégiques. Après avoir distingué trois types de RCS, nous formulons des hypothèses d’intervention sur celles-ci visant à prévenir les erreurs stratégiques. Nous illustrons ces hypothèses par six cas pratiques, en testons certaines par une étude quantitative, et analysons les préférences qui conduisent les dirigeants à les adopter ou non. Nous concluons en discutant les implications théoriques et pratiques de notre démarche. / Many types of strategic decisions result in recurring, systematic errors. Extant theories of organizations are insufficient to account for this phenomenon. Behavioral Strategy suggests that an explanation may be found in the psychology of decision makers, and particularly in their cognitive biases. This, however, calls for a link between individual-level cognition and affects, and organization-level choices. We propose “Strategic Choice Routines” as a middle level of analysis to bridge this gap, and identify three broad types of Strategic Choice Routines.This leads us to formulate hypotheses on how Strategic Choice Routines can be modified to minimize strategic errors. We illustrate these hypotheses through case studies; test some of them quantitatively; and analyze preferences that drive their adoption by executives. Finally, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications.