Managerial vision bias and cooperative governance

What causes firms to behave the way they do when they face different investment opportunities? We argue that both people and processes are behind the decision-making of project implementation. Member and professional CEOs of cooperatives differ regarding their managerial vision towards upstream and downstream projects. Cooperatives with member CEOs are upstream focused and it is reflected by the cascading effect of negative vision bias towards downstream projects. When downstream activities become more important, cooperatives need to replace the member CEOs with professional CEOs. However, a cooperative with a professional CEO may still be in a disadvantageous position if the member-dominated Board of Directors' negative bias towards downstream projects is too strong, which may result in an investor owned firm being the efficient governance structure.

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