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This study tests the main effect of trust on the choice of obfuscation in the form of gift exchange.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-asq-10.1177_0001839220970936 for An Interaction Ritual Theory of Social Resource Exchange: Evidence from a Silicon Valley Accelerator by Rekha Krishnan, Karen S. Cook, Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode and Oliver Schilke in Administrative Science Quarterly

A wide class of economic exchanges, such as bribery and compensated adoption, are considered morally disreputable precisely because they are seen as economic exchanges. However, parties to these exchanges can structurally obfuscate them by arranging the transfers so as to obscure that a disreputable exchange is occurring at all. In this article, we propose that four obfuscation structures—bundling, brokerage, gift exchange, and pawning—will decrease the moral opprobrium of external audiences by (1) masking intentionality, (2) reducing the explicitness of the reciprocity, and (3) making the exchange appear to be a type of common practice. We report the results from four experiments assessing participants’ moral reactions to scenarios that describe either an appropriate exchange, a quid pro quo disreputable exchange, or various forms of obfuscated exchange. In support of our hypotheses, results show that structural obfuscation effectively mitigates audiences’ moral offense at disreputable exchanges and that the effects are substantially mediated by perceived attributional opacity, transactionalism, and collective validity.

Knowledge about entrepreneurial expertise, how experts think and make decisions have progressed in the last decade. Despite this advancement, studies have difficulties in providing a general conceptual model of expertise that is empirically validated. We attribute these limitations to the lack of existing conceptualizations of entrepreneurial expertise to take into consideration the entrepreneur’s dual systems of information processing. Therefore, in this study, we advance a default-interventionist perspective of entrepreneurial expertise consisting of fast and slow-thinking expertise. We suggest that the two types of expertise coexist and interact during the decision-making process except in the decisions characterized by true uncertainty. Furthermore, taking into consideration that expertise is domain-specific, we suggest three broad sub-domains of entrepreneurial knowledge that are malleable to the specific sector in which an entrepreneur operates.

Supplemental material, Rossman_online_supplement for It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional: Moral Perceptions of Obfuscated Exchange by Oliver Schilke and Gabriel Rossman in American Sociological Review

This article examines the economic effects of prizes with implications for the diversity of market positions, especially in cultural fields. Many prizes have three notable features that together yield an emergent reward structure: (1) consumers treat prizes as judgment devices when making purchase decisions, (2) prizes introduce sharp discontinuities between winners and also-rans, and (3) appealing to prize juries requires costly sacrifices of mass audience appeal. When all three conditions obtain, winning a prize is valuable, but seeking it is costly, so trying and failing yields the worst outcome-a logic we characterize as a Tullock lottery. We test the model with analyses of Oscar nominations and Hollywood films from 1985 through 2009. We create an innovative measure of prize-seeking, or "Oscar appeal," on the basis of similarity to recent nominees in terms of such things as genre, plot keywords, and release date. We then show that Oscar appeal has no effect on profitability. However, this zero-order relationship conceals that returns to strong Oscar appeals are bimodal, with super-normal returns for nominees and large losses for snubs. We then argue that the effect of judgment devices on fields depends on how they structure and refract information. © American Sociological Association 2014.

The central thrust of this dissertation is oriented around institutional practices in organizations--i.e., those processes that organizational decision makers take for granted and execute quasi-automatically. My goal is to better understand how such practices emerge and become habitualized over time, how they affect perceptions of the organizational environment, and how they influence organizational success. Specifically, the dissertation analyzes institutional practices as they pertain to (1) routines, (2) trust, and (3) identity.The first chapter investigates the performance consequences of institutional practices in the form of organizational routines in the domains of alliance management and new product development. I develop the argument that the effectiveness of those routines is highest in "normal" environments but comparatively weaker in both volatile and stable contexts, suggesting an inverse U-shaped moderation effect of environmental dynamism on the link between those organizational routines and competitive advantage. Longitudinal key informant survey data from 279 firms provide strong support for my position.Chapter two is concerned with how institutional practices affect perceptions of other organizations in the field. Specifically, I integrate a calculative and a relational perspective on institutions to better understand the sources of organizational trustworthiness perceptions. Using the setting of interfirm alliances and based on dyadic survey data from 171 such alliances, I find that the calculative perspective (represented by contractual safeguards) has higher predictive power when the partner lacks a favorable reputation, whereas the relational perspective (represented by organizational culture) predicts trustworthiness more strongly when familiarity with the partner organization is high.Finally, the third chapter develops a better understanding of how social cognition affects organizational resistance to institutional pressures. A series of experiments shows that perceiving oneself as part of a larger organizational identity reduces participants' tendency to adopt solutions from competitors. I also find that status (low, high) moderates the organizational identity-resistance link. These findings advance our understanding of micro-level sources of organizational action, bring together the highly complementary but thus far largely separate streams of neoinstitutional and identity research, and inform the emerging research stream of behavioral strategy by shedding new light on the role of cognition for strategic action.