Individuals and social systems are often portrayed as risk averse and resistant to change. Such propensities are characteristically attributed to individual, organizational, and cultural traits such as risk aversion, uncertainty-avoidance, discounting, and an unwillingness to change. This paper explores an alternative interpretation of such phenomena. We show how the reproduction of successful actions inherent in adaptive processes, such as learning and competitive selection and reproduction, results in a bias against alternatives that initially may appear to be worse than they actually are. In particular, learning and selection are biased against both risky and novel alternatives. Because the biases are products of the tendency to reproduce success that is inherent in the sequential sampling of adaptation, they are reduced whenever the reproduction of success is attenuated. In particular, when adaptation is slowed, made imprecise, or recalled less reliably, the propensity to engage in risky and new activities is increased. These protections against the error of rejecting potentially good alternatives on inadequate experiential evidence are costly, however. They increase the likelihood of persisting with alternatives that are poor in the long run as well as in the short run.

We thank Daniel Levinthal for his contribution to prior work we draw on here. We are also grateful for comments from participants at the strategy conference at the Cox School of Business, and to David Hoopes for editorial suggestions. Winter acknowledges research support from the Reginald H. Jones Center of the Wharton School. All errors remain our own. AbstractAs emphasized by Barney (1986), any explanation of superior profitability must account for why the resources supporting such profitability could have been acquired for a price below their rent generating capacity. Building upon the literature in economics on coordination failures and incomplete markets, we suggest a framework for analyzing such strategic factor market inefficiencies. Our point of departure is that a strategic opportunity exists whenever prices fail to reflect the value of a resource's best use. This paper examines the challenges of imputing a resource's value in the absence of explicit price guidance and suggests the likely characteristics of strategic opportunities. Our framework also suggests that the discovery of strategic opportunity is often a matter of "serendipity" and access to relevant idiosyncratic resources. This latter observation provides prescriptive advice, although the analysis also explains why more detailed guidance has to be firm specific.1

Individuals are typically more likely to continue to interact with people if they have a positive impression of them. This article shows how this sequential sampling feature of impression formation can explain several biases in impression formation. The underlying mechanism is the sample bias generated when the probability of interaction depends on current impressions. Because negative experiences decrease the probability of interaction, negative initial impressions are more stable than positive impressions. Negative initial impressions, however, are more likely to change for individuals who are frequently exposed to others. As a result, systematic differences in interaction patterns, due to social similarity or proximity, will produce systematic differences in impressions. This mechanism suggests an alternative explanation of several regularities in impression formation, including a negativity bias in impressions of outgroup members, systematic differences in performance evaluations, and more positive evaluations of proximate others.

Organizations learn from other organizations. However, the observations available to them are typically a biased sample. The organizations that can be observed at any point in time are the survivors of a selective process that has eliminated a large fraction of the underlying population. In addition, there is a strong tendency to focus on successful organizations in books and the business press. As a result, the available sample of organizations usually undersamples failure. This paper shows that such undersampling of failure can contribute to a variety of false beliefs about effective management. Simply by observing existing organizations, laymen may get a misleading picture of the determinants of corporate performance. In particular, risky practices, even if they are unrelated to performance in the full population of organizations, may seem to be positively related to performance in a sample of survivors. I argue that this bias frequently implies that the organizational theories of managers and other observers of organizations will be systematically biased. Observations of existing organizations will show that unreliable, uninformed practices and practices that involve concentrated resource allocation are superior to reliable, informed practices or practices that involve diversified resource allocation. I show that this implies that observations of existing organizations will produce compelling but potentially misleading evidence for the significance several common managerial practices.

Humans and animals learn from experience by reducing the probability of sampling alternatives with poor past outcomes. Using simulations, J. G. March (1996) illustrated how such adaptive sampling could lead to risk-averse as well as risk-seeking behavior. In this article, the author develops a formal theory of how adaptive sampling influences risk taking. He shows that a risk-neutral decision maker may learn to prefer a sure thing to an uncertain alternative with identical expected value and a symmetric distribution, even if the decision maker follows an optimal policy of learning. If the distribution of the uncertain alternative is negatively skewed, risk-seeking behavior can emerge. Consistent with recent experiments, the model implies that information about foregone payoffs increases risk taking.