Negotiated belief structures and decision performance: An empirical investigation

When a group approaches a decision, each member may hold a schema for the information domain of the issue in question. A negotiated belief structure represents the politically enacted collection of schemata employed by the group in their deliberations. The aggregation of these schemata is marked by two structural properties—realized coverage and realized consensus. An examination of 713 product decisions made by 29 firms in a simulated business environment indicates that these structural properties are systematically related to product and firm performance.