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With the changing business environment, skills rather than familiarity with rules are more important to accountants’ success. In response to mounting criticisms of accounting education and supported by calls from the Accounting Education Change Commission, efforts have been made by some accounting educators to adapt accounting education to this changing environment. However, there is little research to date about the individual characteristics that can be leveraged to improve the outcome of accounting education. We investigate three individual characteristics: anti-intellectualism, tolerance for ambiguity, and internal locus of control. The results show that all three variables may impact performance in accounting education and that the structure of an accounting program may reward characteristics that are not in line with skills required by the profession. Fortunately, the design of an accounting program may help students alter their skills to be more in line with professional requirements.

Job demands can contribute to nurses’ turnover intention and this can have an impact on health services among the general population. It appears important to identify the work environment factors associated with turnover intention, as well as the psychological resources liable to act on this relationship. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), the purpose of this study (n=1179) is to investigate the relationship between two job demands (role ambiguity and role conflict) and turnover intention, as well as the moderating role of basic need satisfaction (autonomy, competence and relatedness) within these relationships.

This cross-sectional study was conducted among nurses (Québec, Canada). Nurses completed an online questionnaire. To test the proposed moderating effect of satisfaction of the three psychological needs (i.e. autonomy, competence and relatedness) in the relationship between job demands (i.e. role ambiguity and role conflict) and turnover intention, path analysis was conducted using Mplus v.8 (Muthén and Muthen, 2017). Two models, one for each demand, were tested.

As expected, role ambiguity and role conflict are positively related to turnover intention. Results reveal a significant interaction between role ambiguity and satisfaction of the need for autonomy in the prediction of turnover intention. The satisfaction of the need for competence and the satisfaction of the need for relatedness did not moderate the relationship between role ambiguity and turnover intention. Satisfaction of the need for autonomy moderated the relationship between role conflict and turnover intention. Moreover, results revealed a significant interaction between role conflict and satisfaction of the need for competence in the prediction of turnover intention. Satisfaction of the need for relatedness did not moderate the relationship between role conflict and turnover intention.

The results align with the theoretical propositions of several leading theories in occupational health which state that workers’ psychological functioning derives not only from the job characteristics of their work environment, but also from the psychological resources at their disposal. The study contributes to SDT. First, to date, this is the first study to investigate basic psychological need satisfaction as a moderator in the relationship between contextual factors and workers’ functioning. Second, the findings revealed the importance of assessing psychological needs separately, as each contributes in a specific way to workers’ work-related attitudes and adaptation to their professional environment.

Perceptions of autonomy and competence act as key psychological resources for nurses. Managerial support for autonomy (e.g. providing nurses with meaningful information regarding their work) and competence (e.g. providing nurses with frequent positive feedback regarding their work efforts) constitutes a series of key management practices that can foster perceptions of autonomy and competence. The findings show that two role stressors predict nurses’ turnover intention. As such, health care establishments are encouraged to focus on interventions that reduce uncertainties and conflicting situations from nurses (provide clear job descriptions and effective communication).

By promoting a sense of effectiveness and feelings of self-endorsement at work, health care establishments can reduce nurses’ turnover intention and help prevent staffing shortages among this important work group.

Although past research shows that workers’ motivational profile can modulate the relationship between characteristics within the work environment and workers’ functioning, studying the quality of work motivation is not sufficient to completely understand the factors that can influence workers’ reactions to job demands. Need satisfaction is crucial to the development and maintenance of high quality motivation. Evaluating need satisfaction as a moderator in the stressor–strain relationship could offer a better understanding of the psychological experiences that can promote workers’ adaptation to their work environment. To date, no study has investigated the buffering role of psychological needs in the stressor–strain relationship.

This paper aims to present a new term weighting approach for text classification as a text mining task. The original method, neutrosophic term frequency – inverse term frequency (NTF-IDF), is an extended version of the popular fuzzy TF-IDF (FTF-IDF) and uses the neutrosophic reasoning to analyze and generate weights for terms in natural languages. The paper also propose a comparative study between the popular FTF-IDF and NTF-IDF and their impacts on different machine learning (ML) classifiers for document categorization goals.

After preprocessing textual data, the original Neutrosophic TF-IDF applies the neutrosophic inference system (NIS) to produce weights for terms representing a document. Using the local frequency TF, global frequency IDF and text N's length as NIS inputs, this study generate two neutrosophic weights for a given term. The first measure provides information on the relevance degree for a word, and the second one represents their ambiguity degree. Next, the Zhang combination function is applied to combine neutrosophic weights outputs and present the final term weight, inserted in the document's representative vector. To analyze the NTF-IDF impact on the classification phase, this study uses a set of ML algorithms.

Practicing the neutrosophic logic (NL) characteristics, the authors have been able to study the ambiguity of the terms and their degree of relevance to represent a document. NL's choice has proven its effectiveness in defining significant text vectorization weights, especially for text classification tasks. The experimentation part demonstrates that the new method positively impacts the categorization. Moreover, the adopted system's recognition rate is higher than 91%, an accuracy score not attained using the FTF-IDF. Also, using benchmarked data sets, in different text mining fields, and many ML classifiers, i.e. SVM and Feed-Forward Network, and applying the proposed term scores NTF-IDF improves the accuracy by 10%.

The novelty of this paper lies in two aspects. First, a new term weighting method, which uses the term frequencies as components to define the relevance and the ambiguity of term; second, the application of NL to infer weights is considered as an original model in this paper, which also aims to correct the shortcomings of the FTF-IDF which uses fuzzy logic and its drawbacks. The introduced technique was combined with different ML models to improve the accuracy and relevance of the obtained feature vectors to fed the classification mechanism.

This study investigates insurance demand in a two-period model when a decision-maker (DM) is averse to the ambiguity of loss distributions. This study derives sufficient conditions such that the ambiguity-averse DM purchases more insurance than an ambiguity-neutral one when the DM maximises the expected utility. It also derives each sufficient condition to increase insurance demand as ambiguity aversion, ambiguity and downside ambiguity increase, respectively.

The asymmetric volatility phenomenon (‘the phenomenon’, henceforth), documented first by Black (1976), refers to the fact that the stock return and its conditional volatility are negatively correlated. To explain ‘the phenomenon’, this paper presents an asymmetric information model under ambiguity, and provides an empirical test of its result as well. We assume that in the Grossman and Stiglitz (1980), uninformed liquidity traders face ambiguity about the distribution of asset payoffs, and that their attitudes toward ambiguity vary depending on the state of the economy. In model I, their utility functions exhibit ambiguity aversion in the bad state and ambiguity neutrality in the good state. In model II, liquidity traders are still ambiguity-averse in the bad state but ambiguity-seeking in the good state. We find that ‘the phenomenon’ appears in model II when the degree of ambiguity is not large. Furthermore, we show that the possibility of ‘the phenomenon’ is higher as the proportion of liquidity traders increases. To perform an empirical analysis, we measure the degree of ambiguity by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic and show that this measure has a positive relationship with the difference between the volatilities in the good and bad states. In addition, we find that the risk factor constructed by the ambiguity measure has explanatory power about returns on 25 portfolios of the Fama-French type in the Korean market.

The study aims to show that ambiguity aversion exerts a non-negligible effect on the investors' decisions, especially due to the possibility of sharp declines in stock prices.

The vast majority of previous studies on life-cycle consumption and asset allocation assume that the equity premium is constant. This study evaluates the impact of rare disasters that shift the stock market to a low return state on investors' consumption and portfolio decisions. The author assumes that investors are averse to ambiguity relative to the current state of the economy and must incur a per period cost to participate in the stock market and solve their optimal consumption and asset allocation problem using dynamic programming.

The results show that most young investors choose not to invest in stocks because they have low accumulated wealth and the potential return from their stock market investments would not cover the participation costs. Furthermore, ambiguity-averse investors hold considerably fewer stocks throughout their lifetime than ambiguity-neutral ones. The fraction of wealth invested in stocks over the typical consumer's life is hump-shaped: it is low for a young individual, peaks at his early 30s and then decreases until his retirement age.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that assesses the impact of negative stock price jumps on the optimal portfolio of an ambiguity-averse investor.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that systematically captures the ambiguity of different understandings about science, the university and its relation to society, while conceptualising sustainability. Following Corley and Gioia (2004, p. 174) on identity ambiguity and change, it seems pivotal to better understanding the ambiguity of sustainability in relation to academic cultures and university models to manage the transition more effectively.

The nature of this paper’s objectives as well as the wide thematic scope leads to the need of exploring a broad knowledge base. This was best addressed by an exploratory literature review with data collection from primary and secondary sources. The data was interpreted through a hermeneutic analysis and resulted in the inductive development of first categories and goals (further referred to as category development). In addition, a multi-method approach further adjusted the categories and raised their empirical validity and social robustness.

Implementing sustainability involves dealing with a double bound ambiguity due to organisational and individual identity reasons. Five fields of ambiguity were developed to systemise the conceptualisation of a sustainable university along contradictory understandings of science, the university and sustainability. These fields offer a framework to qualitatively assess the degree of sustainability in higher education institutions. Arguments for and against sustainability in universities have been categorised around five criteria and associated to the fields of ambiguity. The finding indicates that meaning in organisational change management for sustainability can be considered both, a potential driver and barrier for a sustainability transition in universities.

This paper exclusively focussed on the internal perspective and left aside any external factors that influence the sustainability transition, such as political measures to stimulate sustainability in higher education. In addition, the operational dimension of a sustainable university has been neglected, which is by all means a necessary and important aspect. The interrelation of the identified goals has not been discussed.

This paper focusses on the conceptualisation and understanding of sustainability within the institution, an often-forgotten but fundamental aspect of implementation. The fields of ambiguity are designed to be applied for assessing the “degree of maturity” of a sustainable university. The fields reveal the different understandings about the role, the mission and the governance of universities, stemming from competing preferences about goals and their assumed relations by various stakeholders of a higher education institutions. The five fields are not an attempt to resolve the hidden contradictions and tensions in a sustainability transition, but to state them clearly to anticipate resistances and conflicts that hinder the development of a shared understanding.

Ambiguity has become a central concept in strategic communication research in recent years. This paper addresses three central deficits in the research to date. First, clarity-focused approaches and ambiguity-focused approaches are in opposition to each other, resulting in an exaggeration of the advantages and opportunities of the respective favored perspective and affording the opposing position little justification at best. Second, research on strategic ambiguity is by and large limited to the organizational perspective and has little interest in societal change. Third, there has been barely any research into concrete practices of strategic ambiguity and these practices have never been systematized.

The research questions will be answered on the basis of the “Theory of Social Systems” (TSS) by Niklas Luhmann, which can be attributed to the “Communication Constitutes Organization” (CCO) perspective. This perspective seems appropriate because the important concepts of communication and decision making play a central role in the TSS.

Strategic communication oscillates between clarity and ambiguity in order to defuse the dilemma and paradox. The re-entry of the distinction is a second-order observation and, thus, reveals the blind spots of clarity- and ambiguity-focused approaches. On this basis, a systematic approach is developed that encompasses various different dimensions of strategic clarity and ambiguity.

The paper focuses on the oscillation between strategic ambiguity and strategic clarity, making clear that the aim is not simply to substitute a new dominance of ambiguity for the clarity that has dominated textbooks thus far. Instead, it is a matter of reflective management of the distinction between strategic ambiguity and strategic clarity. The systematization of the practices of strategic ambiguity and strategic clarity can ultimately be used as a toolbox for the concrete application of strategic ambiguity and strategic clarity.

Overcoming the dualism of clarity-focused and ambiguity-focused approaches makes it possible, first, to explore the situational use of strategic clarity and strategic ambiguity. Second, the societal theoretical perspective shows the way in which organizations respond with strategic ambiguity to the increase in social contradictions without, however, being able to abandon strategic clarity. Third, using the systematic approach to the dimensions presented here, these practices can be described and examined in context.

Purpose – Long-term care (LTC) services assist people with limitations in the ability to perform activities of daily living (ADLs) as a result of chronic illness or disabilities. We discuss possible behavioral explanations for the under-purchasing of LTC insurance, as well as the current state of knowledge on the neural mechanisms behind these behavioral factors.

Findings/approach – Ideas from behavioral economics are discussed, including risk-seeking over losses, ambiguity-preferring over losses, hyperbolic discounting, and the effect of the aging process on the underlying neural mechanisms supporting these decisions. We further emphasize the role of age, as aging is a highly heterogeneous process. It is associated with changes in both brain tissue as well as cognitive abilities, and both are characterized by large individual differences. Therefore, understanding the neural mechanisms is vital to understanding this heterogeneity and identifying possible methods of interventions.

Research implications – LTC financing and insurance is a looming issue in the next 10–20 years. It is important to understand the process by which people make decisions about LTC insurance, heterogeneity in decision processes across individuals, and how these decisions interact with changes in policy and private LTC insurance markets.

Originality/value of the chapter – By providing an overview of the current state of knowledge in behavioral economics of LTC insurance and the neuroscience of aging, this chapter provides some new directions in the emerging area of neuroeconomics of aging.