Strategic decision making in international firms: effect of top management team internationalization on international strategic decision process

In this research project, I have integrated two research streams on international strategic decisions making in international firms: upper echelons or top management teams (TMT) internationalization research and international strategic decision making process research. Both research streams in international business literature have evolved independently, but there is a potential in combining these two streams of research. The first empirical paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision making process: a decision level analysis of rationality, speed, and performance” explores the influence of TMT internationalization on strategic decision rationality and speed and, subsequently, their effect on international strategic decision effectiveness (performance). The results show that the internationalization of TMT is positively related to decision effectiveness and this relationship is mediated by decision rationality while the hypotheses regarding the association between TMT internationalization and decision speed, and the mediating effect of speed were not supported. The second paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision rationality: the mediating role of international information” of my thesis is a simple but logical extension of first paper. The first paper showed that TMT Internationalization has a significant positive effect on international strategic decision rationality. The second paper explicitly showed that TMT internationalization affect on international strategic decision rationality comes from two sources: international experience (personal international knowledge and information) and international information collected from managerial international contacts. For this research project, I have collected data from international software firms in Pakistan. My research contributes to the literature on upper echelons theory and strategic decision making in context of international business and international firms by explicitly examining the link between TMT internationalization and characteristics of strategic decisions making process (i.e. rationality and speed) in international firms and their possible mediating effect on performance

Rise of the Androids: The Reflection of Developers’ Characteristics in Computerized Systems

Due to their speed and accuracy, computerized decision-making and data-analysis systems are often perceived to be close to the ideal of unbounded rationality. Challenging this perception, this study explores the possibility that computerized systems reflect the individual characteristics of the developers who have designed and realized them. Through the analysis of interviews with high-frequency trading system developers and a survey of software developers working in diverse industries, it shows that developers’ characteristics, which have been related to bounded rationality (e.g. experience and expertise), influence their codes’ performance and errors. Computer codes also reflect the personal circumstances of the developers (e.g. deadlines and stress), and their values. However, whereas some developers value code characteristics that are congruent with the ideal of unbounded rationality, including speed and accuracy, others aim to achieve characteristics that could be incongruent with it (e.g. code readability and modularity). Developers’ roles and organizational practices, such as testing procedures and code reviews, limit the expression of their characteristics in their codes. Nevertheless, developers can be often identified by reading the codes. Highlighting that developers transfer some of their characteristics to their codes, this study identifies elements of bounded rationality in decision-making systems and extends organizational decision-making research

Simple Heuristics in Complex Networks: Models of Social Influence

The concept of heuristic decision making is adapted to dynamic influence processes in social networks. We report results of a set of simulations, in which we systematically varied: a) the agents\' strategies for contacting fellow group members and integrating collected information, and (b) features of their social environment—the distribution of members\' status, and the degree of clustering in their network. As major outcome variables, we measured the speed with which the process settled, the distributions of agents\' final preferences, and the rate with which high-status members changed their initial preferences. The impact of the agents\' decision strategies on the dynamics and outcomes of the influence process depended on features of their social environment. This held in particular true when agents contacted all of the neighbors with whom they were connected. When agents focused on high-status members and did not contact low-status neighbors, the process typically settled more quickly, yielded larger majority factions and fewer preference changes. A case study exemplifies the empirical application of the model.Decision Making; Cognition; Heuristics; Small World Networks; Social Influence; Bounded Rationality

Strategic Growth of Firms in the Digital Economy: A Simonian Research Agenda

Strategic growth of firms, in the words of Herbert Simon, is within the framework of decision making under “massive and unending uncertainty.” In the rapidly changing digital economy, the cycle of winning and losing and asset redistribution intensifies as the speed of information exchange increases. It is thus more necessary than ever to find explanatory theories to describe, model, and predict the emerging market structures of the hypercompetitive digital economy. In this paper, we draw upon several Simonian models of bounded rationality in decision making and propose a research agenda for strategic growth of firms in the digital economy. The agenda consists of three major topics: (1) skew distributions in the digital market competition, (2) empirical laws of information use, and (3) a framework of strategic information systems. Some ongoing projects related to the agenda are discussed

Bounded Rationality, Social Learning and Collective Behavior: Decisional Analysis in a Nested World

People are usually brought together in a social network to make synergetic decisions. This decision making process often involves information acquisition and social learning, which are essential to overcome individuals’ bounded rationality. The performance of a society thus depends on the collective behavior of individuals. Besides information attributes, organizational properties often influenced such a decision process. In this article, we introduce a paradigm -- nested world -- that treats social network as a symbolic system. Based on this paradigm, we developed a research model to investigate how information attributes, social parameters, and their interactions influenced the performance of a social network. This research model was subsequently converted to a computational model for analysis and validation. Our findings suggested that informativeness, network density, social influence, and their interactions had significant influence on the performance of whole society. Besides these findigns, many interesting phenomenon were also observed, including significant social learning curve, U-shape decision speed, threshold of network density, and interchangeability between network density and social influence

Re-visions of rationality?

Empirical evidence suggests proponents of the ‘adaptive toolbox’ framework of human judgment need to rethink their vision of rationality

Does modularity undermine the pro‐emotion consensus?

There is a growing consensus that emotions contribute positively to human practical rationality. While arguments that defend this position often appeal to the modularity of emotion-generation mechanisms, these arguments are also susceptible to the criticism, e.g. by Jones (2006), that emotional modularity supports pessimism about the prospects of emotions contributing positively to practical rationality here and now. This paper aims to respond to this criticism by demonstrating how models of emotion processing can accommodate the sorts of cognitive influence required to make the pro-emotion position plausible whilst exhibiting key elements of modularity

An ES process framework for understanding the strategic decision making process of ES implementations

Enterprise systems (ES) implementations are regarded costly, time and resource consuming and have a great impact on the organization in terms of the risks they involve and the opportunities they provide. The steering committee (SC) represents the group of individuals who is responsible for making strategic decisions throughout the ES implementation lifecycle. It is evident from recent studies that there is a relationship between the decision making process and ES implementation success. One of the key elements that contribute to the success of ES implementations is a quick decision making process (Brown and Vessey, 1999; Gupta, 2000; Parr, et al., 1999). This study addresses the strategic decision-making process by SC through its focus on four research questions (1) How can the strategic decision-making process in the implementation of ES be better understood, during each phase of the ES implementation lifecycle? (2) What is the process by which the SC makes strategic decisions? (3) How are fast decisions made? and (4) How does decision speed link to the success of ES implementation? Process models of ES implementation will provide a framework to investigate the strategic decision making process during each phases of the ES implementation lifecycle. Patterns in the decision making process will be explored using strategic choice models. This study develops a research model that focuses on the decision making process by steering committee to explore research questions. It concludes with identifying contributions to both IS research and business practitioners