A Behavioral Theory of the Firm

Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Prentice-Hall.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Textbook

Year

1963

Link

https://archive.org/details/behavioraltheory0000cyer

Cited from

behavioral_economics, cognitive_science, engineering_design, organizational_management

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Bounded Rationality
  • - Organizational management science. The Carnegie School (Simon, March, Cyert) showed firms use standard operating procedures, aspiration-level adaptation, and sequential attention, not comprehensive optimization.

    This sourceOrganizational satisficing; aspiration-level adaptation; quasi-resolution of conflict, problemistic search, organizational learning, coalition view of the firm; supports the firms-satisfice-on-targets and aspiration-adaptation claims.

• Decision
  • Management & organizational science: Decision rights (who decides), RACI matrices (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed), governance structures, escalation procedures, Type 1 vs. Type 2 decisions (Bezos framework: reversible vs. irreversible), command-and-control vs. distributed decision authority, real options analysis — a managerial decision toolkit grounded in Cyert and March (1963), whose behavioral theory of the firm formalized organizational decision-making.

    This sourceRecasts the firm as a coalition with conflicting goals resolved through bargaining, formalizing organizational decision-making and slack.

• Reserve
  • A reserve is a deliberately maintained surplus of capacity, resource, or time held beyond expected need, kept so the system can absorb variation, uncertainty, or shock without failing or degrading, a pattern Cyert and March (1963) named "organizational slack" in their behavioral theory of the firm and Bourgeois (1981) later operationalized for empirical work.
• Satisficing
  • - Aspiration-level adaptation — the threshold a is updated dynamically based on search experience,

    This sourceOrganizational-aspiration adaptation in firm decisions; coalitional model of the firm with satisficing as the standard decision rule. Foundational for behavioral-organizational economics. Cross-G3 B3 candidate: shared with bounded_rationality (#67) — verify dedup at B3.*

• System Slack
  • Mature understanding recognizes slack not as waste to be eliminated but as infrastructure investment whose value becomes visible only under conditions of uncertainty, change, or opportunity

Verification

This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:bbfbf0dd9aae · see in the full table