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

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