Leadership & Organizational Behavior

Similarity scaling often requires subjects to produce such a large number of judgments that fatigue may become a problem. Yet it remains unclear just how respondent fatigue affects similarity perceptions and resulting judgments. The present study uses a categorization perspective to examine the effects of fatigue on similarity judgments. The results suggest that subjects rely increasingly on category membership as they progress through a similarity judgment task.

We argue that although decentralization has advantages in finding low-cost solutions, these advantages are accompanied by coordination problems, which lead to delay or duplication of effort or both. Consequently, decentralization is desirable when there is little urgency or a great deal of private information, but it is strictly undesirable in urgent problems when private information is less important. We also examine the effect of large numbers and find that coordination problems disappear in the limit if distributions are common knowledge.

Meta-analysis has become a popular approach for studying systematic variation in parameter estimates across studies. This article discusses the use of meta-analysis results as prior information in a new study. Although hierarchical prior distributions in a traditional Bayesian framework are characterized by complete exchangeability, meta-analysis priors explicitly incorporate heterogeneity in prior vectors.

This article presents an exploratory investigation into longitudinal patterns of influence in group decision-making. In particular, we focus on how the outcomes of past decisions affect group members' relative influence in future joint decisions. Results suggest that past outcomes play an important role in the resolution of disagreements when group member preferences are equally intense. Losers in prior decisions are likely to win in the future (and vice versa) due to what appears to be promotion of equity in the group.

A central assumption of meta-analysis is that the sample of studies fairly represents all work done in the field, published and unpublished. However, if studies with "poor" results are less likely to be published, a potential publication bias is present. The authors propose a maximum likelihood approach to estimating publication bias for the situation in which censorship based on effect size may occur. An explicit hypothesis test is provided for testing whether or not censorship is present.

The ultimate success of new product R&D depends as much on customer acceptance as on technological breakthroughs. In this article, Susan Holak and Donald Lehmann focus on customer acceptance by exploring the manner in which the general attributes of Rogers (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, divisibility and communicability) plus perceived risk combine to form the intention to buy an innovation. Results demonstrate a causal structure among these attributes and lead to various implications for R&D guidelines and product design.

By committing to terminate funding if a firm's performance is poor, investors can mitigate managerial incentive problems. These optimal financial constraints, however, encourage rivals to ensure that a firm's performance is poor; this raises the chance that the financial constraints become binding and induce exit. We analyze the optimal financial contract in light of this predatory threat. The optimal contract balances the benefits of deterring predation by relaxing financial constraints against the cost of exacerbating incentive problems. (JEL 610)

This article explores the profit-sharing aspects of codevelopment agreements and focuses specifically on the nature of the city's financial involvement. Cities are increasingly using a vast array of financial mechanisms, including loan paybacks, participatory leases, and equity participations, to give them a more direct financial stake in projects. Sagalyn examines the financial structures of several codevelopment projects throughout the country.

Research on object concepts has identified one level of abstraction as "basic" in cognition and communication. We investigated whether concepts for routine social events have a basic level by replicating the converging operations used to investigate object concepts. In Experiment I, subjects were presented with event names from a taxonomy and were asked to list the actions comprising the event.