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Lab studies on culture and corruption have led to some puzzling, contradictory results. This chapter begins with a discussion of nonexperimental work in this area and evaluates the experimental findings in the context of earlier research. We sketch out the channels through which culture interacts with corruption (i.e., through institutions and social norms) and argue that discrepancies in experimental results may be due to differences in design (including repetition or unobserved variation in beliefs) or due to differences in the response to punishment across societies. In addition to exploring design-based reasons for previous contradictory findings, avenues for future research include: behavioral responses to different types of externalities; replicating results in different countries; and utilizing the lab to formulate effective anticorruption measures.

Entrepreneurial opportunity (EO) identification pertains to the core processes of entrepreneurship and innovation. The initial phase of this process starts with individual cognition, which is why cognition has been established as a critical theoretical perspective.

Knowledge and new information have been confirmed as essential cognitive impact factors. However, it is not understood well, how individuals apply those factors and how they actually identify innovative and economically viable EOs. To address the limitations of current research, this chapter investigates the current literature on underlying cognitive processes of opportunity identification.

The literature analysis demonstrates that there is not a single cognitive process but rather a magnitude of different micro-mechanisms that are necessary for the successful identification of EOs. The findings are grouped to four categories of cognitive processes and entail their micro-mechanisms: pattern recognition, information processing, and creative thinking. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that those micro-mechanisms have seldom been related to each other within the scope of opportunity identification. This chapter closes this gap by discussing and contrasting and the different process categories and respective micro-mechanisms and suggests an integrative theory development and avenues for future research.

There is a research gap in strategic management regarding the complement from managerial cognition literature to the behavioral theory of firm, as well as linkage between cognitive structure and cognitive process of strategy formulation in the field of managerial cognition, which also calls for further exploration. The purpose of this paper is to construct a model from an integrated view for explaining the process of cognitive reconstruction under incremental changes.

Qualitative research is conducted in the form of 17 semi-structured interviews in four hidden champions operating in China. Based on the model generated from the literature review, this paper adopts the abductive logic for data analysis.

This paper draws the following conclusions. The cognitive structure is shaped by the changing environment and the performance feedback, the variance in structural attributes will affect whether the changing environment destructs the effectiveness of original cognitive structure or not, the centrality of cognitive structure will promote the efficiency of tried-and-true organizational adaptations to incremental changes, and cognitive structure reconstruction is the result of the recursive process of trial-and-error learning.

This paper proposes the model explaining the interaction mechanisms between cognitive structure and strategy formulation process. It also presents the iterative sense-making process for reconstructing cognitive structure in strategy formulation. Both of them extend the understanding on managerial cognition in organizational adaptations to incremental environmental changes.

We discuss the following three themes on the use of field experiments to study economic development: (1) We summarize the arguments for and against using experiments to gather behavioral data in the field; (2) We argue and illustrate that field experiments can provide data on behavior that can be used in subsequent analyses of the effect of behavioral social capital on economic outcomes; and (3) We illustrate that field experiments can be used as a development tool on their own to teach communities about incentives and strategic interaction.

The paper addresses mainly three questions. One, do workers tend to be employed by employers of the same ethnic group; two, what is the structure of the equilibrium wage contract; and three, do more ethnically homogeneous labor markets tend to have different labor contracts than more ethnically diversified ones. The answer to the first question is in the affirmative – in equilibrium all employers offer the same wage contract and workers are hired by employers of the closest ethnic affiliation. In terms of the equilibrium wage contract, its nature depends on the attitude toward risk of both sides of the market. Finally, the answer to the third question is also in the affirmative since the more homogenous the labor market, the more deterministic is the wage.

The purpose of this work is to experimentally measure trust and study its relationship to group loan allocation within a community bank.

An artefactual field experiment is run to capture a measure of trust that mimics aspects of trusting behavior in a community bank. The experimental design and empirical setting take into account risk and altruism, two known confounders of trust measures. Regression analysis is used to estimate the relationship between a novel measure of trust and the loan amount a borrower receives from their rural community bank.

The trust measure has a statistically significant, positive relationship with loan size. A one standard deviation increase in the trust measure corresponds to a 13.3 percent increase in the loan amount.

Results of the study suggest that, for community banks, trust in a borrower plays a large role in screening applicants and therefore determining loan size. Several such banks have considered graduating to commercial credit. However, given the outsize role of trust in lending decisions, it is not clear if commercial lending models – which rely less on social capital – will work.

A new trust game is developed that captures relationship-specific measures of directed trust that community bank members have towards each borrower. The trust measure is also context-specific as play in the game is analogous to how community bank members trust some borrowers (more than others) with larger loans. The emphasis on relationship- and context-specific trust measures is key to interpreting results from artefactual field experiments.

Studies of entrepreneurial action often distinguish between different phases such as opportunity identification, evaluation, and exploitation. Yet, the richness of past contributions masks the absence of an integral framework to organize, in a theoretically consistent ensemble, the different kinds of cognitive processes that underpin entrepreneurial action. In this chapter, we draw from research on human action and cognition to offer an integrative model of the cognitive processes that foster entrepreneurial action. By presenting a more specific articulation of when, how, and why different cognitive processes operate, we provide theorists and empiricists with a more complete picture of how entrepreneurs’ thinking evolves from the emergence of an opportunity idea to the initiation of concrete entrepreneurial acts. In addition, our framework draws attention to cognitive inflection points that entrepreneurs must navigate in their journey toward entrepreneurship. By explicitly locating these inflection points and specifying the changes in mental processing that occurs at each point, we highlight that for entrepreneurial action to ensue, entrepreneurs must shift from one type of cognitive processing to another. Along this line, our model draws attention to the entire set of cognitive “skills” entrepreneurs must master for successful completion of each phase and successful transitions between phases.

Our primary objective is to provide method-related broad guidelines to researchers on the entire spectrum of issues involved in cause mapping and to encourage researchers to use causal mapping techniques in strategy research. We challenge strategists to open the black box and investigate the mental models that depict the cause and effect beliefs of managers, “walk” readers through the causal mapping process by discussing the “nuts and bolts” of cause mapping, provide an illustration, and outline “key issues to consider.” We conclude with a discussion of some promising research directions.

The article addresses issues raised in this Journal (Vol. 3, Issue 1) on the relationship between supporting people and neighbourhood renewal. Using findings from an actionresearch project, it argues the case for placing community care within a social inclusion framework which uses a community development approach.