Managerial Cognition, AI-Augmented Decisions, and Corporate Sustainability: Behavioral and Institutional Perspectives

Decisions that shape corporate sustainability outcomes, whether to invest in green innovation, disclose ESG risks, or respond to environmental regulation, are ultimately made by people operating under uncertainty, cognitive constraints, and institutional pressure. Yet the behavioral and cognitive dimensions of these decisions remain underexplored relative to their structural and financial counterparts. This Research Topic seeks to fill that gap by bringing together scholars who examine how cognition, attention, and judgment interact with emerging AI tools and shifting governance environments to produce, or undermine, sustainable corporate behavior.The rise of AI in business contexts introduces a dual dynamic. On one hand, algorithmic systems expand managerial information-processing capacity, enabling faster and more data-rich responses to climate risk, ESG signals, and regulatory change. On the other hand, they introduce new cognitive dependencies, accountability ambiguities, and potential for automated rationalization of unsustainable practices. Understanding how decision-makers interpret, trust, override, or defer to AI-generated inputs in sustainability-relevant contexts is a question that sits squarely at the interface of cognitive science, management research, and public policy.This Topic welcomes contributions that engage with these dynamics from multiple angles. We are particularly interested in work examining executive cognition and managerial attention in green investment and ESG disclosure decisions; the role of cognitive biases, including overconfidence, myopia, and status quo bias, in corporate environmental governance; how AI tools reshape the decision architecture of boards, managers, and institutional investors in sustainability contexts; behavioral responses to environmental regulation and carbon policy under varying information conditions; and the cognitive underpinnings of greenwashing, sustainability assurance, and stakeholder communication.We welcome both empirical and theoretical contributions, including experimental, computational, and large-sample econometric approaches. Comparative evidence from emerging markets and transition economies is especially encouraged, given the institutional heterogeneity that enriches cognitive and behavioral explanations of corporate sustainability.By convening researchers across cognitive science, management, environmental economics, and behavioral finance, this Topic aims to advance a research agenda that takes seriously both the mental architecture of decision-makers and the institutional environments in which they operate, an agenda that is, we believe, essential for understanding the uneven and sometimes paradoxical trajectories of the corporate green transition. Topic editors: Xue Lei, Shanshan Yue Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80328/managerial-cognition-ai-augmented-decisions-and-corporate-sustainability-behavioral-and-institutional-perspectives