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International Food and Agribusiness Management Review Vol. 2/No. 2/1999
In addition, these six managers, as well as most business managers
(Mitntzberg, 1971; Kotter, 1999), indicated they devoted a majority of their
business day to working with people, primarily on logistical issues. These
owner/operators invested significant time “designing and maintaining” the inter-
nal and external economic relationships of their businesses. Trustworthiness in
these relationships creates operational efficiency benefits by freeing up valuable
managerial time resources that can be reallocated to economically productive
activities.
Likewise, these experiments revealed that agribusiness managers operate under
extreme time pressures, and economic decisions are made within this binding
temporal constraint. Bounded rationality accurately characterizes their day-to-day
decision making. Marginal decisions on the allocation of physical assets appear to
be made quickly and accurately given the time available for the decision.
Finally, these empirical results lend support to the claim that identity-relevant
economics should occupy a greater amount of space in agribusiness journals and
discussion time in classrooms. Institutional design, contracts, agency, interaction
costs, collective action, social capital, and game theory capture a greater part of
the intellectual core for understanding many important economic transactions.
Acknowledgments: We appreciate the helpful comments by Wayne Howard, Gary Thompson,
and two reviewers on an earlier version of this paper.
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