Research suggests that people tend to be fooled by randomness and mistake luck for skill, particularly when evaluating extreme performances. I argue that these predictable mistakes can be translated into a source of competitive advantage: informed managers can exploit others’ misperceptions of luck, such as by arbitraging in strategic factor markets. I then discuss limits to this arbitrage strategy due to social constraints: stakeholders may not be able to accurately evaluate performances and may disapprove atypical strategic activities, suggesting that only (...) strategists who are less sensitive to this “lemon problem” can take advantage of the resulting arbitrage opportunities. I conclude with a flowchart about when strategists should pursue this alternative source of strategic opportunity that turns the well- known biases on their head. (shrink)

Derrida and Economics analyses two essays of Jacques Derrida on the Public and Democracy, alongside other essays reflecting these political works. However, Derrida's political thought will be taken seriously by emphasising Economics before Politics. Economics will be viewed as a detour, a detour inflecting every attempt to present a meaningful political position or stable political realm. For Derrida, economics has the force of an oblique ruse. Derrida ADd BconoDdcs aligns Derrida's view of economics with the Eighteenth Century realisation that a (...) stable SOciety, analogous to the Antique ideal of the Polis, is neither a common goal nor a proper object for Political philosophy. Here, Classical economics emerges as an oblique attempt to construct the conditions for the possibility of a political body through economic relations. This epistemological 'en passant' is familiar, in Britain, as Adam Smith's' Invisible Hand'. For Derrida, the equi valent Continental ruse is distinguished by a faith in 'dialectical idealisation'; a process bent upon securing an idealised po 11 tical space, but unable to limit its more speculati ve drifts. If Classical economics represents an attempt to construct the possibility of the Body Politic, Derrida's political essays deconstruct this possibility. His emphasiS upon the 'possible' highlights the effects of risk and competition in an economy that could never comfortably be identified wi th a stable Polt tical realm. For Derrida, economics is not simply an attempt to secure or rewrite more direct Political discourses. As he argues, its every detour is haunted by the possibility of speculative failure. Derrida argues an enthusiasm for economics can also imply a preoccupation with the finitude of the Body Politic. This observation allows him to comment upon the valorisation of death or redundancy in certain poli tical discourses; i. e. those analyses that, in the throes of Depression, remain devoted to the idea of redundancy as though to the object of a renewed political will. (shrink)

We provide experimental evidence that subjects blame others based on events they are not responsible for. In our experiment an agent chooses between a lottery and a safe asset; payment from the chosen option goes to a principal who then decides how much to allocate between the agent and a third party. We observe widespread blame: regardless of their choice, agents are blamed by principals for the outcome of the lottery, an event they are not responsible for. We provide an (...) explanation of this apparently irrational behavior with a delegated-expertise principal-agent model, the subjects’ salient perturbation of the environment. (shrink)

The thesis critically appropriates the collaborative philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to argue that the general tendency of capitalism is towards the disintegration of high-level control structures (for instance, the nation-state). This disintegration does not entail a movement towards total chaos or anarchy. I argue that capital generates its own guidance mechanisms, but ones that act at a low-level, and respond flexibly to changing conditions (an instance of micro-politics). One of the difficulties of this project stems from the (...) fact that the canon of philosophical discourse itself operates as a high-level control structure. In Marx, the development of capital is controlled by a secularized Hegelian dialectic that determines the outcome of capital in socialism. For Freud, the low level organization of the unconscious is subjected to high-level control through the universality of the Oedipus complex. By addressing the need for new philosophical instruments to understand capitalism, the thesis produces critiques of Marx and Freud, and advances a philosophy of economics by examining the function of axiomatics. Moreover, in critiquing presupposed structures (for example, the unconscious as a theatre of representation), the thesis argues for an immanent system (mulliplicity) of interaction within capitalism. The research undertaken to complete the thesis has consisted of contemporary experiments in complexity theory, and current socio/economic analyses of labour markets. Of particular interest has been the current deindustrialization that has taken place in the west coast of the United States. With the influx of a periphery into the core area of Los Angeles, the current role of urban politics and minor literatures (most notably Shakur's autobiography) unleash desire into the circuit of the city. I conclude with a re-examination of micro political/economic movements that have manifested themselves into the economy of Los Angeles. By decoding locally impoverished economic and cultural sectors, emergent properties have sprouted by realigning subversive activity onto the apex of capital (an immanence to capitalist processes). (shrink)

The paper argues that the work of Gabriel Tarde on imitation provides a fertile means of understanding how capitalism is forging a new affective technology which conforms to a logic of propensity rather than to means-end reasoning. This it does by drawing together a biological understanding of semiconscious cognition with various practical geometric arts so as to re-stage the world as a series of susceptible situations which can be ridden rather than rigidly controlled. The paper examines the advent of technologies (...) which attend to the variable geometry of so-called animal spirits in the realm of business and then, using Tarde's work as a springboard, considers some alternative means of understanding imitative rays which have less instrumental undertones. The paper is an illustration of the way in which biology and culture have increasingly become intertwined. (shrink)