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Scholars in a variety of disciplines, including organizational theory, strategic management, and economics, have devoted substantial attention to the question: why are some firms more innovative than others? It has been largely accepted that when the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of inter-organizational collaborations than individual firms. Strategy researchers have recently begun to explore how inter-firm networking affects organizational innovation performance, and reported intriguing yet conflicting findings. Drawing perspectives from strategic alliance, social networks, and technology innovation, I proposed an integrative framework to investigate the combined effects of a firms network centrality and structural hole on organizational innovation performance. Furthermore, I examine the innovation performance both in terms of innovation rate and innovation value. I conducted a longitudinal study on a population of firms from 1990 to 1999 in pharmaceutical industry (SIC 2834). The results of the study indicate that: 1) Network centrality helps a firm to increase its rate of innovation, and structural hole helps to improve its value of innovation, while both effects are non-linear. 2) Network centrality positively moderates the relationship between structural hole and innovation value. 3) Structural hole negatively moderates the effect of network centrality on innovation rate. The joint effects suggest that firms with advantageous network positions are more capable of making wise technology selections and focusing their efforts on innovations of greater value.

This dissertation examined the effects of social influence on employees perceptions of organizational support (POS). An important characteristic of POS is that it reflects an employees subjective evaluation of the treatment he or she receives from the organization. Employees interactions with their coworkers, then, may have an important influence on their POS. As a result, the development of POS may be a social process rather than solely an intrapsychic one. However, the majority of POS research has focused on how an individual employees personal experiences with an organization affect his/her POS and largely ignored social factors. To address this gap in the literature, I argue that advice ties between employees will be related to similarity in POS because they serve as a source of social information. Friendship ties, on the other hand, will result in similarity in POS because they are utilized for social comparison. Finally, role model ties will result in similarity in POS because employees learn from the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of others they respect and admire. In addition, I explored the differential effects of strong and weak ties and muliplex versus simplex ties on similarity in POS. My expectation was that strong ties and multiplex ties would be more influential than weak ties and simplex ties. Finally, I explored the effects reciprocated and non-reciprocated ties with the expectation that reciprocated ties would be more highly associated with POS because they are characterized by information sharing. Social network methods were utilized to test hypotheses among 93 admissions department employees at a university in the eastern United States. Results indicated that when reciprocated ties were considered, employees tended to have POS that are similar to those of their strong role model ties, strong advice-role model ties, and strong friend-advice-role model ties. However, when reciprocity was not a requirement for strong ties between employees, only strong friend-advice-role model ties were related to similarity in POS. This pattern of results suggests that strong, multiplex ties in which two-way information sharing occured were more likely to lead to similarity in POS. Implications were drawn from these findings, and suggestions for future research were made.

Although entrepreneurs of promising start-ups (Bhide, 2000) usually started their venture without novel ideas, deep experience, high credentials, or ample resources, the companies they eventually built represent the majority of fast-growing, privately held businesses (e.g. Inc. 500 companies) in the United States, which have significantly contributed to job creation and the growth of the economy. Instead of conducting extensive prior planning and research, promising start-ups depend on the lead entrepreneurs capabilities of making good decisions as it goes. Meanwhile, the start-up process and the cognitive studies of entrepreneurial rationality have been increasingly recognized as holding the central place in entrepreneurship research. Despite their clear practical and theoretical importance, current literature does not provide a comprehensive framework of the start-up process of promising start-ups, which can explain the ongoing interactions between entrepreneurs and the market, and the role played by the entrepreneurs rationality in this process. To pursue this objective, this dissertation proposes that entrepreneurial discovery is the process of promising start-ups adaptation and learning, where entrepreneurs through their actions influence how the market will react and what they will learn from it, dynamically shaping the market process. It makes two major methodological improvements on existing research: 1) it uses lead entrepreneurs close observation of the entirety of actual start-up process as data; 2) it borrows analytical methods from cognitive science to study entrepreneurial discovery as a knowledge-based problem solving process where entrepreneurs knowledge base becomes the most critical factor in determining their behavioral outputs and influencing their sensory inputs. The results indicate that behavior for effective entrepreneurial discovery is compelled by multiple principles, whose applications converge to a common underlying pattern among promising start-ups. Besides breaking new ground in its methodology, this dissertation contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by being the first to explicate the many facets of the rationality of entrepreneurial discovery as principles of behavior that can not only give the most complete and detailed explanation currently available of the unfolding of entrepreneurial discovery, but serve as the basis to guide practicing entrepreneurs behavior and to evaluate and improve entrepreneurship education and learning.

This dissertation investigates the cognitive processes businesspeople use to resolve ethical dilemmas. I assert that to accurately represent the ethical decision making process, it is necessary to move beyond ethical decision making models that rely solely on rational choice and utility theory. I develop a behavioral model of ethical decision making that extends and improves upon existing models in two ways. First, I apply dual-process cognition theories to account for the fact that not all decisions are made in a deliberative and effortful manner (which I call deep choice). At times decisions are made based on intuition, heuristics, stereotypes, and other non-deliberative processes (which I call shallow choice). Second, I include the influence of emotions on the ethical decision process. Many managers attempt to remove emotions from the workplace, but emotions influence the decision process and must be acknowledged in a descriptive ethical decision making model. A key observation stemming from this revised model is that the ethical considerations of an action may not be actively evaluated in a decision, but may instead be bundled with a shallow choice. This makes it critical to understand how organizations can influence the creation, content, and use of shallow choice. A discussion of ethical choice necessarily involves a dialog regarding the methods used to evaluate the quality of the ethical decision. I critique the current measurement instruments and suggest five guideposts to help overcome the duality of the need to apply universal principles and the necessity to respond to the particular situation when resolving an ethical dilemma. I clarify and explain dual-process cognition and the proposed model by using them to explain trust formation in organizations. I also apply the model to describe how managers cope with the time pressure that is so prevalent in business today. I suggest workers engage in ethical satisficing, that is, they accept solutions that surpass some minimal ethical threshold, but which do not represent the most ethical response available. I also establish a foundation upon which a theory of ethical satisficing can be built. Lastly, I discuss implications of the proposed model and future research opportunities.

Agents who perform interrelated tasks or work in similar local conditions often observe each other's actions and local signals. However, such information is often costly for the principal to obtain. Analytical models show that in such a situation, a peer reporting system with a verification mechanism (using one agents information to verify the others) and a reward for truthful whistle blowing can induce agents to report honestly and thereby help the principal achieve the first-best outcome. However, behavioral research suggests that the agents perception regarding the fairness of the principal as well as cheap talk among agents may affect both how honestly agents report and how willing they are to blow the whistle on their peers. The results of the experiment show that under a peer reporting system, the agents' perception regarding the fairness of the principal positively affects the agents reporting honesty and negatively affects the agents rate of collusion. Communication between agents decreases their honesty and their whistle blowing when the principal is perceived as unfair, but not when the principal is perceived as fair.

Incentives of executives and board of directors play an important role in corporate decisions. Principal agent theory suggests a tradeoff between risk and incentives in optimal compensation contracts for managers. The first essay of this dissertation explores the relationship between the distribution of incentive compensation among top executives and firm risk. This essay develops and tests a two-agent model of optimal incentive compensation for corporate executives. The model investigates the effects of firm risk and cooperation among executives in the design of incentive contracts and offers two contrasting propositions: 1. When importance of cooperation is invariant to risk, the ratio of incentive compensation of the CEO to that of other top executive(s) increases with risk. 2. In contrast, when importance of co-operation increases with risk, the ratio of incentive compensation first increases and then decreases with risk. Using EXECUCOMP data from 1992 to 2002 I test these propositions and find evidence supporting the second proposition, but none for the first. The second essay examines the relation between board independence of target firms and the returns to targets and acquirers around takeover announcements. Using a sample of 232 large relative size takeovers, I reexamine whether target board independence is related to target or acquirer returns and their share in the total wealth change around announcements. Unlike Cotter et al. (1997), I do not find independent target boards to be associated with higher target premiums or lower acquirer returns. Similar to Wulf (2004), I find that target returns are lower when target CEOs obtain CEO positions in the merged firm. However, target board independence does not mitigate the lower premium targets receive when their CEOs are CEOs of the merged firm. I conclude that the takeover market is competitive such that target board independence is unrelated to gain sharing between targets and acquirers in larger relative size takeovers.

Participation of users in the information systems development (ISD) process has been widely advocated by both academicians and practitioners. Most researchers utilize user participation as a behavioral construct when studying various ISD outcomes. However, both the ISD literature and the Participative Decision-Making (PDM) literature imply the insufficiency of the behavioral approach to participation, especially when studying productivity-related ISD outcomes. This research adopts an efficacy approach to participation, and proposes knowledge participation as a new construct to assess the effectiveness of participative activities performed by users in an ISD process. The construct of knowledge participation is studied to ascertain whether it has more predicative power than user participation when predicting productivity-related ISD outcomes. In addition, team cognition, specified here by its two elements shared awareness of expertise location and shared task understanding, are proposed as a mediating mechanism that transforms the effect of knowledge participation on ISD productivity outcomes such as team performance and system quality. Some ISD environmental factors, such as business context complexity, system complexity, management support, and project size are studied as control variables. An experimental study and a field study are designed to test the proposed research model.

My dissertation consists of three essays that examine the effects of processes that take place in the pre-decision stage of decision-making on subsequent self-regulation. In my first essay I examine a new construct dealing with individuals' tendency to elaborate on potential future outcomes and develop a scale to measure it. Elaboration on potential outcomes captures the degree to which individuals generate positive and negative consequences of their behaviors, as well as the degree to which they evaluate the likelihood and importance of these consequences. I first develop the Elaboration on Potential Outcomes (EPO) scale and establish its factor structure, reliability and validity. I then investigate its relationships with conceptually related yet distinct consumer traits. Third, I examine its association with various consumer behaviors such as exercise of self-control, procrastination behaviors, compulsive buying, credit card debt, retirement investing, healthy lifestyle, and obesity. Finally, I show that peoples' tendency to think about potential outcomes predicts the type of information processing they engage in when making an important consumer decision, as well as the choices they make. In my second essay I examine consumers' tendency to elaborate in potential outcomes in the context of investment behavior. In three studies I show that investors with a stronger chronic tendency to engage in pre-decision outcome elaboration are less likely to be affected by different types of descriptive variance effects, which emerge when individuals make different decisions as a function of how information is presented to them. Furthermore, I find that encouraging pre-decision elaboration on the pros and cons of investing helps investors who tend not to engage in such elaboration to become less influenced by peripheral cues such as information framing and presentation mode. Finally, in my third essay I examine a different pre-decision process goal activation at different levels of abstraction. The main question I look at is whether activating high- vs. low-level goals by asking consumers to consider why they should achieve a goal rather than how they can achieve it might differentially affect their pursuit of this goal. In two studies I examine the interactive effects of decisional status (pre- or post-decisional) and goal hierarchy (high- vs. low-level goal activation) on several self-regulatory domains: goal commitment, anticipated effortful goal pursuit, and choice.

This study offers a new approach to understanding the diffusion of a new technology; specifically on the process of information sharing and its influence on a market based standards contest. Since diffusion relies upon adopting firms to gather information and learn about a new technology prior to adoption, communication of a technologys attributes and benefits is essential to the overall process of diffusion. The flow of information from sponsors to adopters is an influential action that serves to impact both the speed and degree of adoption of a new technology and can influence the outcome of market based standards contest. I explore these issues through a case analysis of the wireless phone industry and the 2G standards contest in the United States by studying the information sharing actions and events of two technology sponsors; Ericsson and Qualcomm. I develop a model of information sharing that identifies how aspects of timing, message, media, and target of influence combine to form two primary types of information sharing; cascade and broadcast. This model draws on concepts from the relevant body of literature on standards contests, social networks and communication theories.