Richard Cyert Quotes

We believe that, in order to understand contemporary economic decision making, we need to supplement the study of market factors with an examination of the internal operation of the firm – to study the effects of organizational structure and conventional practice on the developments of goals, the formation of expectations, and the execution of choices.

In general, success tends to breed slack. One of the main consequences of slack is a muting of problems of resource scarcity. Slack provides a source of funds for innovations that would not be approved in the case of scarcity but that have strong subgroup support.

Effective retention is heavily dependent on recruiting students with the potential to graduate.

In recent years there has been increased interest in the effects of internal communication on decision processes. A number of hypotheses relating the bias in information to the final decision have been proposed. In this paper we discuss two laboratory experiments which were designed to test two such hypotheses. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that cost and sales estimations are made with the implicit assumption that a biased pay-off structure exists. The second experiment tests explicitly the effects of biased and unbiased pay-off structures on estimation within an organization. An analysis of the data for the two experiments is made and some implications for further research are drawn from the results.

Relatively unsuccessful firms would be more likely to innovate than relatively successful firms.

After two years of study, I'm happy to tell you that dire projections about declines in the U.S. work force due to technological change are exaggerated at best.

Rational actors are significantly constrained by limitations of information and calculation.