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This paper aims to enumerate the factors influencing the process of decision-making, those which are mostly related to personality affected by cultures and sub-cultures dominating the individual’s life, such as possessing internal and external control agents, tolerating or avoiding ambiguities and its comparison with a belief in fatalism or free will and the effect of these beliefs and traits on the personality.

This paper demonstrates that these beliefs would result in the formation of different personal characteristics; for instance, active and passive individuals and those who are keen to discover problems to solve them and change the existing state of affairs to the desired ones. Some individuals can make decisions and some cannot.

The researcher has tried to make a comparative study and address the genuine Islamic culture as manifested in the Quran, Prophet’s Tradition and Shiite way of life. In this relation, the case studies are the Battle of Uhud and the Quranic verses related to the research to demonstrate that a Muslim manager, by dismissing fatalism while trusting in God’s blessing, could be distinguished from others.

This study adds to our knowledge that managers can make sound decisions by relying on their Shiite culture, self-confidence, rational thinking, consulting the wise people and above all trusting in God.

Introduction – Markowitz (1952) argues that individuals act rationally in their financial decisions. In contrast, Kahneman and Tversky (1979) claim that the psychological characteristics of people significantly affect financial decisions. In making these decisions, factors such as age, gender, and educational status may have an impact.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to determine whether financial literacy has an impact on individuals’ cognitive biases related to financial investments.

Methodology – A sample of 444 individuals were surveyed.

Findings – In the results of study (1) it was determined that financial literacy leads to differences in cognitive biases; and (2) cognitive biases of individuals who do not receive finance education are different from individuals who receive finance education and professionals in the business world. The findings indicate that the increase in the level of financial literacy of individuals will reduce the cognitive biases and heuristics, and therefore will have a positive effect on the investor behavior in financial markets.

The “fuzzy front end” of new product development (NPD) is characterized by considerable uncertainty and ambiguity, but detailed studies of ambiguity specifically related to NPD are missing. This paper aims to establish a classification of ambiguity in NPD processes.

The authors' research design is a holistic multiple‐case‐study design with the NPD project as the unit of analysis. A model is developed through a grounded theory approach, using qualitative analysis of case data from four medical‐device companies.

The authors present a model that classifies ambiguity along two dimensions: subject and source. The subjects of ambiguity include product, market, process, and organizational resources, whereas the sources of ambiguity include multiplicity, novelty, validity, and reliability.

As the study is based on just four case studies in a single industry segment, further research is needed to determine the model's wider applicability. Further research is also suggested, exploring how and in what contexts ambiguity should be managed as a balance between reducing or sustaining it.

The model presented helps practitioners to better understand the origins and character of ambiguity in NPD, thereby improving their ability to manage it in their NPD projects.

The model provides an improved theoretical understanding of ambiguity as a component of “fuzziness” in NPD by providing a detailed account of how ambiguity is related to specific elements of the NPD process in terms of where and why it occurs.

The symbol‐based epistemology used in artificial intelligence is contrasted with the constructivist, coherence epistemology promoted by cybernetics. The latter leads to bootstrapping knowledge representations, in which different parts of the system mutually support each other. Gordon Pask’s entailment meshes are reviewed as a basic application of this approach, and then extended to entailment nets: directed graphs governed by the “bootstrapping axiom”, determining which concepts are to be distinguished or merged. This allows a constant restructuring of the conceptual network. Semantic networks and frame‐like representations can be expressed in this scheme by introducing a basic ontology of node and link types. Entailment nets are then generalized to associative networks with weighted links. Learning algorithms are presented which can adapt the link strengths, based on the frequency with which links are selected by hypertext users. It is argued that such bootstrapping methods can be applied to make the World Wide Web more intelligent, allowing it to self‐organize and support inferences.

Presents the results of Phase II of a study examining use of integrated curriculum as a reform strategy in US schools. The purposes of this phase were to determine how the uses of integrated curricula change over time and to explore relationships between teacher implementation of integrated curricula and principal beliefs and practices. Telephone interviews with a subset of principals of schools using integrated curriculum gathered information about changes in use since the original data collection, team planning practices, involvement with peer coaching, teacher involvement with decision processes, and relationships among principal belief systems, practices, and support of integrated curriculum. Results, using qualitative and quantitative methods, show that over time integrated curricula use increased and became more sophisticated, time is an obstacle even with common planning periods, teacher involvement in decision processes increased, and principals overwhelmingly believe that the integrated curriculum has positive effects on teachers and students.

The domain of monetary donation is evolving with the combination of professional donation platforms and social network sites (SNSs) in the agency process, potentially enhancing information communication and facilitating money transfers between donors and recipients. However, SNS donation avoidance hinders the leveraging of significant economic and social values. To address the limited understanding of the phenomenon of SNS donation avoidance, this study aims to investigate the influencing factors of people's avoidance behavior in the agency process of SNS donation.

A model was devised containing four process-related factors (requests overload, process ambiguity, channel security concerns and perceived distributive injustice) as antecedents of SNS donation avoidance, with probable mediating paths of negative emotions, altruistic outcome expectation and egoistic outcome expectation. Data were collected through a survey of 398 users of WeChat Moment in China. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the proposed model.

All four process-related factors have positive associations with SNS donation avoidance. Requests overload, channel security concerns and perceived distributive injustice all positively influence people's expectation of negative emotions and lead, in turn, to their SNS donation avoidance. Perceived distributive injustice also leads to SNS donation avoidance via negatively influencing people's expectations of both altruistic and egoistic outcomes.

Theoretically, this empirical study synthetically associates process-related factors to donation avoidance through the paths of emotional responses and rational outcome expectations. Practically, it emphasizes key factors to consider in the process management of SNS donation.

The effect of ambiguity is investigated with regard to the success of a venture on the initial choice of interpersonal conflict management strategy of the venture's initiator. In the experiments reported here, subjects were asked to imagine a hypothetical situation in which the decision‐maker, in a capacity as an organization member, seeks the use of an organizational resource in order to initiate the venture. The conflict arises as another member of the organization also lays claim to the same resource. Subjects, taking on the role of the decision‐maker, show more collaboration in managing the conflict when experts disagree about the probability of successful outcome of the venture. Similar inclinations are revealed when the possible long‐term adverse consequences of the conflict are made explicit. These findings support the interpretation of ambiguity effect in terms of increased loss aversion due to personal responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating role of culture in terms of uncertainty avoidance in the antecedents of customer-based bank reputation in two countries with different cultural patterns.

This study was carried out by surveying 910 bank customers of the main banks in the UK and Spain. The hypotheses employed in this research were developed by contrasting the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance in the relationships between bank reputation and its antecedents, and were then tested through the use of partial least squares modelling.

Significant differences between British and Spanish bank customers were found with regard to the impact of innovation, workplace and leadership on bank reputation. However, the results obtained when considering uncertainty avoidance as a continuous moderator variable suggested that only the differences found as regards workplace and leadership were owing to this variable, thus providing empirical support for two out of the eight hypotheses developed on the basis of cultural theories.

This is the first study to analyse whether the relative importance of the antecedents of bank reputation differ with regard to customers’ uncertainty avoidance patterns, which is the cultural variable that is most closely linked in literature to customers’ banking decisions. This study contributes towards reputation research by showing that cultural differences in terms of uncertainty avoidance should be used with caution when establishing business guides for bank managers.

Due to an increasingly international marketplace with multinational companies selling their products around the world, the issue of advertising products across countries has received considerable attention. In the academic literature, two basic and opposing approaches to international advertising can be identified. The localisation (adaptation) approach requires that advertisers focus on the differences between countries in order to develop advertising messages that are tailored to local markets. Proponents of this approach emphasise cultural uniqueness. In order to be successful, advertising needs to reflect differences in needs, wants, values, traditions, language, and economic variables (Britt, 1974; Nielsen, 1963; Unwinn, 1974; Ricks, Arpan & Fu, 1974; Ricks, 1983). The standardisation (globalisation) approach, on the other hand, focuses on the similarities between countries and develops global advertising campaigns which eliminate the need for adaptation to local conditions. Proponents of this approach see the world as a “global village” in which the differences between countries are diminished and where consumers have developed similar needs and wants, independent of location (Fatt, 1967; Elinder, 1965; Levitt, 1983; Lynch, 1984).

Absenteeism is a costly behavior that occurs around the world. However, in spite of the growth in cross‐cultural research in organizational research and in global businesses, very few studies have examined absenteeism from a cross‐cultural perspective. This study examined the effect of national culture on absenteeism using a sample of 17,842 respondents from 24 countries. Based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions, we postulated that uncertainty avoidance, power distance, individualism, and masculinity will be negatively related to absenteeism. Similarly, based on the GLOBE cultural dimensions, we proposed that there will be positive relationships between societal collectivism and assertiveness, and absenteeism. However, we hypothesized that in‐group collectivism and gender egalitarianism will have negative relationships with absenteeism. To test our cross‐level hypotheses, we used Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Our results indicated that with the exception of uncertainty avoidance and assertiveness, all our hypothesized relationships were supported. Consistent findings were obtained for the common elements of both the Hofstede and GLOBE cultural dimensions, demonstrating convergence of our findings. We offer theoretical and practical implications of our study and suggest future research directions in the culture‐absenteeism link