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Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

How do organizations respond to negative feedback regarding their innovation activities? In this chapter, the authors reconcile contradictory predictions stemming from behavioral learning and from the escalation of commitment (EoC) perspectives regarding persistence under negative performance feedback. The authors core argument suggests that the seemingly contradictory psychological processes indicated by these two perspectives occur simultaneously in decision makers but that the design of organizational roles and reward systems affects their prevalence in decision-making tasks. Specifically, the authors argue that for decision makers responsible for an individual project, responses given to negative performance feedback regarding a project are dominated by self-justification and loss-avoidance mechanisms predicted by the EoC literature, while for decision makers responsible for a portfolio of projects, responses to negative performance regarding a project are dominated by an under-sampling of poorly performing alternatives that behavioral learning theory predicts. In addition to assigning decision-making authority to different organizational roles, organizational designers shape the strength of these mechanisms through the design of reward systems and specifically by setting more or less ambiguous goals, aspiration levels, time horizons of incentives provided, and levels of failure tolerance.

Expertise in designing organizations is an important construct for scholars interested in studying the micro-foundations of organizational performance. We investigate the existence and nature of this expertise in this chapter. Conceptualizing the designing of organizations as a problem-solving process, we describe the underlying structure of this problem space. Further, we propose that this process of problem solving should look different for “greenfield” design problems and for “brownfield” redesign problems. We test our arguments through a comparison of the think-aloud verbal protocols of 16 subjects with greater experience with organization design problems (experts) and 16 subjects with significantly lower experience with organization design problems (novices). The results suggest that the parts of the problem that experts focus on are different from those that novices focus on, and expertise matters differently for design and redesign problems.

The attention-based view (ABV) of the firm highlights the role of decision makers’ attention in firm behavior. The ABV vastly improves our understanding of decision makers’ focus of attention; how that focus is situated in an organization’s procedural and communication channels; and how the distribution of the focus of attention among decision makers participating in those procedural and communication channels affects their understanding of a situation, their motivation to act, and, ultimately, their behavior. Significant progress has been made in recent years in refining and extending the ABV. However, the role of individual differences in the capacity to read other people’s desires, intentions, knowledge, and beliefs – that is, the theory of mind (ToM) – has remained on the sidelines. The ToM is a natural complement to the ABV. In this study, we explore how the ToM allows for an understanding of the advantage that organizations have over markets within the ABV.

Accounting practitioners and educators agree that effective oral and written communication skills are essential to success in the accounting profession. Despite numerous initiatives to improve accounting majors’ communication skills, many students remain deficient in this area. Communication literature suggests that one factor rendering these initiatives ineffective is communication apprehension (CA). There is general agreement that accounting students around the globe have higher levels of CA than other majors. Therefore, accounting educators interested in improving students’ communication skills need to be aware of the dimensions and implications of CA. This chapter provides a review of the relevant literature on CA, with a focus on CA in accounting majors. It also presents intervention techniques for use in the classroom and makes suggestions for future research.