In 2025: It’s decisions under risk
This week: Platform power, employee creativity, algoactivism, decisions under risk
Taming platform power
Bottoms up
“This integrative review presents two perspectives on platform accountability: a bottom-up, emergent perspective focused on lower-powered actors; and a top-down, institutional perspective focused on legal, regulatory, and governance changes. Synthesizing these perspectives, we argue that multisided plat- forms require multisided accountability systems, we provide an integrated framework on platform accountability, and we suggest promising directions for future research.”
Rahman, H. A., Karunakaran, A., & Cameron, L. D. (2024). Taming platform power: Taking accountability into account in the management of platforms. Academy of Management Annals, 18(1), 251-294.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/92k57/download
When and how artificial intelligence augments employee creativity
If you know you know…
“AI technologies may assist employees in becoming more creative by generating new and useful ideas at work, but starkly more so for employees with higher job skills. Thus, AI-augmented employee creativity is skill-biased.”
Jia, N., Luo, X., Fang, Z., & Liao, C. (2024). When and how artificial intelligence augments employee creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 67(1), 5-32.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=4397280
Algorithms at work: The new contested terrain of control
Algoactivitism
“A final insight related to algorithmic control is our identification of emerging tactics of resistance, within and beyond the workplace. Studies of technical and bureaucratic control have demonstrated that workers can resist control in a variety of ways, from individual strategies of resistance to collective organizing through discursive framing and legal mobilization (e.g., Morrill et al., 2003). Here, we advance the concept of “algoactivism” to both describe emerging tactics along each of these lines and distinguish them from prior resistance tactics. We also suggest areas for future research related to each kind of resistance.”
Kellogg, K. C., Valentine, M. A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at work: The new contested terrain of control. Academy of management annals, 14(1), 366-410.
Decisions under Risk Are Decisions under Complexity
Sometimes we just make mistakes okay?
“These findings suggest that much of the behavior motivating our most important behavioral theories of risk derive from complexity-driven mistakes rather than true risk preferences.”
*“*Our contribution is to also ask the same subjects to value what we call deterministic mirrors of each of these 12 lotteries. Deterministic mirrors are described exactly as lotteries are, but with a change to the payoff rule that removes risk from the lottery. Instead of paying the contents of 1 box opened at random as in a lottery, in a mirror payoffs are determined by opening all 100 boxes, summing their values and weighting the total by the total number of boxes. In other words, the mirror pays the expected value of its corresponding lottery with certainty.”
“We provide evidence that some of the central lottery anomalies in behavioral economics (those used to measure phenomena like probability weighting, reference dependence, and loss aversion) are not special phenomena of risk and therefore are unlikely to reflect decision-makers’ risk preferences. Instead, they are to a great extent patterns of heuristic mistakes that occur because lotteries are complex to properly evaluate, i.e., because their values are not transparent to decision-makers but are instead costly or difficult to infer.”
Oprea, Ryan. 2024. "Decisions under Risk Are Decisions under Complexity." American Economic Review, 114 (12): 3789–3811.
Reader Feedback
“A great manager clears the path to execution…so what causes the blockers?”
Footnotes
It certainly seems reasonable that every organization has sources and sinks of anxiety. I wonder if AI is a source and a sink? AI can be a legitimate source of anxiety, as it threatens the status quo. It may be a sink, as it can absorb an awful lot of misery.
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