Are human contingency judgments based on associationistic principles such as cue competition or on normative principles as specified by rational-cognitive models? In this study, participants learned to predict an outcome from several simultaneously presented cues. They were asked to judge the cues in regard to causal power or statistical concepts such as probability or relative frequency. Unifo...

This paper relates firm size and opportunism by showing that, given certain behavioral dispositions of humans, the size of a profit-maximizing firm can be determined by cognitive aspects underlying firminternal cultural transmission processes. We argue that what firms do better than markets – besides economizing on transaction costs – is to establish a cooperative regime among its employees tha...

To date, IT outsourcing research has focused on applied problems and case studies. Two bodies of theory offer useful and needed perspectives on both the risks and the factors or variables which affect the risk of outsourcing IT. Transaction cost economics provides a thorough description of the conditions under which the risks of opportunism and inflated transaction costs are high. The Resource-...

Are minorities more vulnerable to opportunism? We find that individuals from a minority group face greater danger of being cheated by an opportunistic firm because trade with the group is less frequent and the value of a reputation for fairness toward the group is correspondingly smaller. If the majority is sufficiently large it can only lose from a solidarity strategy of punishing opportunism ...

Researchers criticize the transaction cost economics (TCE) paradigm for over-generalizing the assumption of opportunism as human nature. We suggest that opportunistic propensity is affected by cultural prior conditioning of individualism–collectivism (I–C). Specifically, we propose that individualists have a higher opportunistic propensity in intra-group transactions, and collectivists in inter...