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This study seeks to address the question on the role of information-seeking behavior in dealing with uncertainty on workplace health disclosure from the perspectives of internal communication.

An online survey was conducted with 409 full-time employees in large-sized companies in the United States.

The results showed that employees engage in proactive and passive information-seeking strategies when they are uncertain about their supervisors' reactions toward their health problems. Positive EOR and organizational climate would increase their intention to adopt inquiry strategy, whereas negative EOR and the climate would increase their intention to adopt monitoring strategy. Employees who adopt inquiry strategy tend to perceive the benefits of health disclosure, whereas those who adopt monitoring strategy tend to perceive the risks of health disclosure. If employees perceived increased benefits in terms of health disclosure, then they tend to disclose their health problems to their supervisors, and vice versa.

This study is among first to investigate workplace health disclosure decision-making from the perspectives of internal communication. These findings highlight the importance of excellent internal communications in employees' health disclosure decision-making process and support the proposition that proactive information-seeking is a strategy that contributes to uncertainty management in the workplace. This study also provides significant practical guidelines for corporate communication practitioners and leaders by establishing a safe and friendly environment where employees feel comfortable to disclose their health problems to supervisors.

This paper seeks to investigate the effects of different influential factors on consumer perceptions of uncertainty for online shopping.

In this research, consumer perceptions of uncertainty have been divided into perceived commodity uncertainty and perceived seller's behavior uncertainty, and the influential factors concerned are experienced commodity attributes, online communication, buyer's comments, and the warrants of the consumer to consumer (C2C) operator. Based on the theoretical framework, this paper takes a structural evaluation model to analyze the research hypotheses.

Taking TAOBAO.com as an example, the empirical research results indicate that perceived commodity uncertainty can be reduced by all the influential factors directly, and the perceived seller's behavior uncertainty can be reduced by online communication. In addition, the results also show that the perceived seller's behavior uncertainty can significantly affect the buyers' will, and perceived commodity uncertainty can indirectly affect the buyers will through the perceived seller's behavior uncertainty.

Based on the empirical results, the paper argues that in order to effectively reduce the seller's behavior uncertainty and eliminate information asymmetry, the main issues C2C are faced with currently is to establish a more comprehensive protection mechanism and to develop more equitable trade rules.

Compared with previous research on risk and uncertainty, this paper provides experimental analysis of the consumer perceptions of uncertainty for online buyers. It reveals the effects of different influential factors on the perceived uncertainty of consumers, which would help to explain the online consumer's behavior. Furthermore, the results from this research can enrich the understanding of the theory of risk.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mechanism of benevolent leadership on employee cheating behavior through two paths – employee uncertainty and perceived acceptability of norm violation – and also reveal the possible dark side of benevolent leadership. Meanwhile, the moderating effects of leader behavioral integrity in the cognition dual path process are also discussed.

This study invites 383 employees and their superiors in seven Chinese enterprises as the research objects and conducts a paired survey at three time points, and then Mplus 7.4 software is used to analyze the empirical data.

The results are shown as follows. Benevolent leadership plays a positive role on uncertainty and perceived acceptability of norm violation. Uncertainty and perceived acceptability of norm violation mediate the relationship between benevolent leadership and cheating behavior, respectively. Leader behavioral integrity moderates the positive role of benevolent leadership on uncertainty and perceived acceptability of norm violation. Leader behavioral integrity moderates the indirect effect of benevolent leadership on employees' cheating behavior through uncertainty and perceived acceptability of norm violation.

This study reveals the mechanism behind the negative role of benevolent leadership through the cognition reaction of employees to benevolent leadership and broadens the research scope of benevolent leadership. Meanwhile, it provides some practical inspiration for leaders to effectively use the benevolent leadership style and restrain employees' cheating behavior.

This study aims to examine individuals' tendency to strictly follow their own signal while ignoring predecessors' decisions when making decisions under varying degrees of uncertainty.

Using a controlled laboratory experiment, the authors separate the follow-own-signal behavior from other types of behavior such as Bayes consistent or herd-like (i.e. follow-the-majority) behavior.

As the authors systemically increase the degree of uncertainty in the information environment, participants are increasingly more likely to act only on their own signal. This suggests that financial decisions that are made under highly uncertain market conditions may be more signal revealing, and hence, may lead to better information aggregation than previously thought. The authors also find that as uncertainty increases, participants are more likely to switch in and out of this behavior, suggesting that behavior under highly uncertain conditions may also be more random and complex.

The authors are the first to examine how uncertainty affects the follow-own-signal behavior. The authors also offer potential testable empirical implications, such as an increase in contrarian investing, home bias, and own-company ownership under times of increased uncertainty or in more uncertain markets.

The purpose of this paper is to find how those uncertainty factors influence transaction costs generated and to identify ways to minimize the transaction costs borne by the construction owner.

The literature indicates that there is no consensus on a standard definition of transaction costs in the construction industry. A detailed literature review of research work on transaction costs in construction is conducted in order to identify the determinants of transaction costs in construction projects. A structural equation model is tested on data collected by means of a survey administered to construction owners.

The findings indicate that the transaction costs borne by the owner can be minimized if the owner minimizes the uncertainties inherent in the construction project by making sure the engineering design is as complete as possible before bids are sought from contractors; harmonious relationships between project participants; fair risk allocation; have experience in similar type projects; and contractor selection practices that routinely detect irregular behavior.

The data used in this research are primarily based on the experiences of public owners and the markets in which they operate; a larger representation of private owners could make the conclusions more general. Another limitation of the study is that it relies on a survey of opinions rather than actual records of costs and other hard data.

No empirical study has ever been conducted of transaction-related issues in the construction industry because of the lack of a common understanding of transaction cost. This paper provides the groundwork for such a study.

This paper attempts to reconcile the many determinants of transaction costs in construction projects under uncertainty considered by different researchers in a multitude of research studies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the interaction between the availability of financial information and individuals' cognitive profiles to explain investors' herding behavior.

The authors designed and conducted an experiment to observe the behavior of subjects in three settings, each with a different level of information.

Results confirm that a dependence relation exists between information, investors' behavioral biases and the herding phenomenon. Moreover, the experiment shows that information concerning the number of previous transactions in the market is particularly relevant to explain herding propensity among investors. The findings indicate that the cognitive profile of investors is more relevant as the availability of information increases and the number of previous transactions in the market is low.

Future research should examine further the best way to measure the individual's cognitive profile and its interaction with information limitation in financial markets. The presence of high levels of uncertainty favors herding behavior regardless of inter‐individual differences, and only when the availability of information is high and the number of transactions is low does the subjects' cognitive profile explain the investors' herding behavior. Finally, it is observed that not all public information receives the same attention by investors. The attractiveness of public information requires further attention.

The herding phenomenon is difficult to anticipate because there are factors of a very diverse nature that intervene.

The research described in this paper measures investors' cognitive profile to identify the interaction between availability of information, cognitive profile and herding.

Under given environmental uncertainties, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of brokers on the networking behaviour of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) and the subsequent impact on the performance of SMEs. The following five different types of brokers were tested, namely, coordinator, representative, cosmopolitan, liaison and gatekeeper brokers.

Data were collected through an online survey and analyzed by using the hierarchical regression method.

The results from the hierarchical regression analysis of 198 Czech firms showed that coordinator and representative brokers moderate the relationship between environmental uncertainty and networking behaviour. However, under high environmental uncertainty, the coordinator broker worked best, whereas in the host country, under low environmental uncertainty, the representative broker worked best.

The findings of this study have useful implications for SMEs in selecting an appropriate broker for strengthening their networking behaviour in the international market. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of various types of brokers on networking behaviour during their internationalization of SMEs. More specifically, this study examined if and how, given the uncertainties in the international market, multiple brokers help SME executives develop networking behaviour.

In this paper, the authors examine the short-term and long-term impact of general economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and crypto-specific policy uncertainty on Bitcoin’s (BTC) exchange inflows – a form of crypto investor behaviors that the authors expect to drive the cryptocurrency volatility.

The authors use an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL), coupled with the bounds testing approach by Pesaran et al. (2001), to analyze a weekly dataset of BTC’s exchange inflows and relevant policy uncertainty indices.

The authors observe both short-term and long-term impacts of the crypto-specific policy uncertainty on BTC’s exchange inflows, whereas the general EPU only explains these inflows in a short-term manner. In addition, the authors find exchange inflows of BTC “Granger” cause its price volatility. Furthermore, the authors document a significant and relatively persistent response of BTC volatility to shocks to its exchange inflows.

This study’s findings offer significant contributions to research in policy uncertainty and investor behaviors.

Economic policy uncertainty (EPU) has huge impact and harm on real economy, so the economic logic and other economic effects behind this must be further studied. By constructing the “China Economic Policy Uncertainty Index” to capture the degree of EPU faced by Chinese companies, the authors empirically test whether and how EPU affects the level of executives' perquisite consumption.

This study investigates the relationship between EPU and executive perquisite consumption based on a sample of 3,185 publicly listed firms in China. To examine the relationship between EPU and executives' perquisite consumption, a mixed least squares method was used for regression. To alleviate the problem of missing variables that do not change over time and control the influence of unobservable individual heterogeneity at the firm level, the firm fixed effects model is used for regression.

The study finds that EPU is positively associated with executive perquisite consumption. This positive association is stronger for firms with smaller size, lower management shareholding and higher levels of separation of ownership and control. Effective external governance (i.e., analyst coverage, media coverage, auditor and market competition) can mitigate the relationship between EPU and executive perquisite consumption. Further analysis reveals that EPU increases executive perquisite consumption by holding more cash and decreasing firm risk taking. EPU hurts market value of firms by boosting executive perquisite consumption and tunneling.

In an environment with high EPU, the board of directors should reduce managers' compensation performance sensitivity to ease the agency conflict caused by uncertainty. Firms should improve their governance mechanisms and standard and pay attention to their environmental changes. Policymakers should pay attention to maintaining the continuity and predictability of policies, stabilizing the economic policy expectations of market entities and avoiding frequent changes in policies that can harm economic and firm value. The regulatory authorities should actively guide listed companies to increase active information disclosure during periods of high policy uncertainty.

This study contributes to the research on corporate governance by showing how EPU influences executives' behaviors. The authors advance relative studies by showing that this uncertainty embedded in a firm's external environments influences executive perquisite consumption. This study also contributes to the literature on how internal and external governances influence corporate behavior during uncertainty. These findings extend this line of research by suggesting that effective external governance is an attribute that can alleviate the effect of uncertainty on managers' opportunistic behaviors.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationships among information‐seeking behavior, interpersonal communication, perceived procedural justice, and the reduction of job‐related uncertainty.

The sample consisted of 323 Japanese white‐collar workers who completed the questionnaires, with a usable sample of 295.

The results of covariance structure analysis (SEM) revealed that: there were not any direct relationships between information‐seeking behavior and the reduction of work‐related uncertainty; information‐seeking behavior induced a change of voice, explanation, and rational interpersonal communication from decision makers; the provision of voice, explanation, and social sensitivity from decision makers caused outcome recipients’ perception of procedural justice; and their perception of procedural justice caused the reduction of job‐related uncertainty.

There are some limitations of the present study that can be addressed in future research. First, the concept of uncertainty might have been used too broadly to have been applied to the concept of job‐related uncertainty. Second, the respondents in the present research were highly educated white‐collar workers and were selected to attend business school by their companies.

The results of the present study have some practical implications. Under a newly introduced managerial system of performance‐based personnel practices, Japanese companies need to establish a system by which workers can form judgements of fairness.

The paper suggests that one must exercise caution when generalizing the findings of the present study without taking into account the characteristics of the respondents.