Title: One-Peron-Company, Deception and Firm Adaptation

Speaker: Yanfeng Zheng (Hong Kong University Science & Technology)

Time: 10:00 (Thursday), Mach 12, 2026

Venue: Room1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

I revisit the Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTOF), which views firms as coalitions of bounded rational human agents adapting via searching with routines, localized attention, and intra-firm politics to yield satisficing outcomes. While BTOF has been extensively validated, AI’s superior information processing and reasoning capabilities challenges some fundamental assumptions and predictions arising from conventional BTOF (e.g., dominant coalition). It raises new questions with novel terms such as “one-person company”. In this preliminary study, I ask: How should human agents calibrate their trust in AI, and how do uniquely human behaviors such as information distortion jointly shape firm outcome? Using a computational model that embeds an AI agent alongside a human agent, I find: 1) as widely expected, a hybrid decision mode often outperforms human-only or AI-only mode; 2) counterintuitively, moderate human deception toward AI improves performance by acting as social regularization that tempers overconfident AI guidance, and 3) these benefits are contingent on key environmental and organizational factors. By incorporating AI as a distinct participant in firm decision making process, this study aims to extend the BTOF toward a sociotechnical theory for the upcoming AI era.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Yanfeng Zheng is currently an associate professor with tenure at the Hong Kong University Science & Technology (HKUST). He earned his Ph.D. in management from University of Wisconsin Madison. His research interests revolve around the nexus of innovation and entrepreneurship. Specifically, he studies how high-tech startups develop capabilities through organizational learning and the consequences. His work has been published at leading management and entrepreneurship journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Industrial and Corporate Change, Research Policy, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and more. He was the recipient of the Irene M. McCarthy Award for the best paper on the topic of High Technology and Innovation at the Babson International Entrepreneurship Conference. Dr. Zheng has extensive teaching experience in strategic management and entrepreneurship. He serves the editorial board of Academy of Management Journal and won the Best Reviewer Award twice. Zheng published a series of Fintech cases such as eToro, Lemonade, Quantopian, PingAn Virtual Bank, and Wealthfront.