Decision making dynamics in corporate boards

Members of boards of directors of large corporations who also serve together on an outside board, form the so-called interlock graph of the board and are assumed to have a strong influence on each others' opinion. We here study how the size and the topology of the interlock graph affect the probability that the board approves a strategy proposed by the Chief Executive Officer. We propose a measure of the impact of the interlock on the decision making, which is found to be a good predictor of the decision dynamics outcome. We present two models of decision making dynamics, and we apply them to the data of the boards of the largest US corporations in 1999. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.