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This paper aims to investigate the potential influence of managers on sustainability assurance. When the quality of sustainability reporting is questionable because of subsequent restatements, the authors explore whether assurance is used to enhance its credibility as a legitimization tool or as an impression management strategy. Additionally, the authors analyze how capital markets react to this potential managerial capture and, particularly, whether investors penalize this practice through the cost of capital.

Using an international sample from 2012 to 2016 and panel data regressions, this study relies on DICTION’s master variables of optimism and certainty to examine the impact of managers on assurance and the market’s reaction to these practices.

The study shows that some managers might use assurance as a legitimization tool rather than as a means of reinforcing the credibility of sustainability reporting. In such cases, the results reveal that investors penalize (reward) managerial influence (no influence) on assurance.

The new findings help companies understand that they will not improve their financing terms if investors perceive that managers have influenced assurance. Moreover, these findings emphasize the need for standardization to clarify assurance criteria and prevent managerial influence.

Managerial influence on assurance raises doubts about its value in terms of reducing information asymmetry and especially improving investors’ decision-making.

The present study represents the first evidence of the potential use of assurance for non-informative purposes. The authors provide clear evidence of how investors penalize managerial influence on assurance, in contrast to the mainstream literature, which shows that this practice always improves investors’ decision-making and is rewarded.

This study aims to analyze the causes and implications of legal uncertainty in the issuance of conventional municipal bonds in Indonesia and to draw lessons from Vietnam’s approach in providing better legal certainty.

This study adopts a normative legal method with a legislative approach and applies a comparative approach. Data sources involve primary and secondary legal materials from both Indonesia and Vietnam.

The legal uncertainty is caused by a lack of coherence and consistency in legislation. Based on Vietnam’s experience, Indonesia can gain valuable insights related to providing strong legal certainty for parties involved in issuing or investing through conventional municipal bonds.

This study focuses on the comparative legal analysis of conventional municipal bonds in Indonesia with Vietnam.

This research provides recommendations for the refinement of legislation regarding conventional municipal bonds to the government.

This study is related to legal certainty as a strategy to attract investment through municipal bonds and to ensure the municipal bond issuance process is transparent and efficient.

This study provides a comparative perspective on the issuance of municipal bonds in Indonesia, with a special focus on Vietnam, emphasizing the urgency of harmonization in legal regulation and the sustainability of legal certainty.

The emerging business partner role of management accountants (MAs) results in an increased requirement of MAs to make business decisions. Frame dependence cognitive biases regularly influence decisions made in conditions of uncertainty, as is the case in business decision-making. Consequently, this study aims to examine susceptibility of MAs to frame dependence bias.

A survey was conducted among an international sample of practising MAs. The proportion of MAs influenced by framing bias was analysed and compared to findings in other populations. Logistic regression was then used to determine whether MAs who exhibit a higher preference for evidence-based (as opposed to intuitive) decision-making are more susceptible to framing bias.

Despite a comparatively high preference for evidence-based decision-making, the prevalence of framing bias among MAs is comparable to that of other populations. A higher preference for evidence-based decision-making was found to only be associated with higher susceptibility to endowment effect bias.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to comprehensively examine framing bias for MAs as a group of decision-makers. Additionally, this study’s sample consists of practising MAs, and not only students.

In the wake of severe socio-economic damage, many firms have made creative and technological progress in their responses to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper examines internal and external environmental complexity elements as antecedents of business responses and builds a framework for tourism firms to respond to the pandemic crisis.

This study obtained survey data from 395 respondents in the Vietnamese tourism and hospitality industry. A partial least squares structural equation modeling–artificial neural network approach was used to examine various combinations of internal and external environmental complexity elements that have different impacts on business responses and firms' performance.

The knowledge and practice created by the firm's employees (individual creativity), obtained from traditional contexts (traditionality) were identified as internal environmental complexity factors while practice learned from other firms (mimetic pressure), information processing (status certainty) and digital transformation (digital technology speed) were treated as external environmental complexity factors. Internal and external environmental complexity factors influence business responses and firms' performance positively but differently.

This study demonstrates that firms should integrate their internal environment of creativity and traditionality with external environmental factors of mimetic pressure, status certainty and digital technology speed to create better business responses, and thus firm performance in the COVID-19 era.

This investigation contributes to environmental research and narrows the existing research gap relating to the association between types of environmental complexity and firms' responsive action, which then influence firms' performance in terms of sustainable competitiveness.

Primary teachers play a vital role in fostering pupils' successful futures. Therefore, gaining knowledge of primary teacher students' learning processes, including the achievement of information-seeking skills, is crucial. The aim of this paper is to understand better the interplay between cognitive appraisals and emotions in the constructivist process of learning and achieving information-seeking skills.

In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with six Swedish primary teacher students. The analysis of qualitative data was deductive and theory-driven, guided by Kuhlthau's information search process model, Scherer's semantic space of emotions and Pekrun's control-value theory of achievement emotions.

Anger/frustration, enjoyment and boredom were identified as activity emotions and anxiety, hopelessness and hope as prospective outcome emotions. The retrospective outcome emotions found were pride, joy, gratitude, surprise and relief. The appraisals eliciting the achievement emotions were the control appraisals uncertainty/certainty (activity and prospective outcome) and oneself/other (retrospective), and value appraisals negative/positive intrinsic motivation (activity) and failure/success (prospective and retrospective). The interplay between appraisals and emotions was complex and dynamic. The processes were individually unique, non-linear and iterative, and the appraisals did not always elicit emotions.

The study has theoretical and methodological implications for information behaviour research in its application of appraisal theories and the Geneva affect label coder. In addition, it has practical implications for academic librarians teaching information-seeking skills.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the supervening loss of inter-organisational trust in long-term commercial contracts. The underlying research question is whether contract law – the legal institution regulating economic exchanges – should intervene and enable a party to a long-term commercial contract to extricate itself from a situation where a relationship of trust has broken down irretrievably.

This paper uses doctrinal methodology and theoretical conceptualisation to answer the underlying research question. The legal instrument chosen for analysis purposes is the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. This paper also draws on extant literature on inter-organisational trust (including conceptual and empirical studies) to support the arguments and propositions. Furthermore, this study proceeds to assess the substantive justifiability of the proposed remedial measure using four normative values: legal certainty and predictability, protection of the performance interest, economic efficiency and the preservation of the relation.

The central argument put forward in this paper is the reformulation of draft Article 6.3.1 proposed by the UNIDROIT Working Group on Long-Term Contracts, which confers a novel right to terminate for a compelling reason. This paper presents a multidimensional model of inter-organisational trust that would serve as the conceptual framework for the proposed reformulation of the provision and establishes a coherent juridical basis for the legal solution that would accord with the Principles of International Commercial Contracts’ general remedial scheme. As for the normative assessment, this paper demonstrates that the proposed remedial measure would significantly promote efficient outcomes and positively serve the norms of legal certainty, protection of the performance interest and the preservation of the relation.

This paper addresses the lacuna in current legal scholarship in relation to the adverse socio-economic effects following trust violation and deterioration in inter-organisational relationships. Additionally, the propositions and findings should contribute to the workings of the UNIDROIT in adopting new rules and principles that would serve the special requirements of cross-border trade.

This article aims at contributing to the literature using conjoint experiment methods for political economic problems. The author measures the stated willingness of young adults to start an enterprise in hypothetical realities described by different levels of six institutional factors pertaining to the business environment.

The author conducts the “forced-choice” conjoint experiment on a sample of 200 young Polish students. This analysis allows for the verification of the expectations concerning the differences in the respondents' stated preferences relating to the potential obstacles to their entrepreneurial inclinations. The author estimates the average marginal component effects (AMCEs) and the marginal means (MMs).

Evidence is provided that the institutional factors are not similarly significant to the stated entrepreneurial preferences of Polish young adults. Legal certainty and economic freedom are the attributes of the most notable effect on respondents' feelings about perceived entrepreneurial barriers; however, the results vary across the subgroups.

The study results provide a tentative perspective on the Polish young adults' feelings about institutions as a potential obstacle to their entrepreneurial inclinations. The employment of conjoint methodology lays the groundwork for scholars studying the entrepreneurial environment, legal institutions and current public mood of different social groups.

This study is a unique attempt to answer political economic questions concerning entrepreneurial institutions in Poland through the implementation of a comprehensive market research method. In addition, the author indicates a specific set of six institutional factors as well as define a distinct group of young adults.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it highlights areas of disconnect between how the financial services sector in the UK approaches the requirement to evidence source of wealth when conducting customer due diligence; the requirements of the UK’s laws and regulations in relation to evidence source of wealth; and the expectations of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in this regard. It then proposes an alternative approach to evidencing source of wealth.

Semi-structured interviews have been carried out among compliance professionals in UK financial services.

This paper provides rare insight into the anti-money laundering arrangements of UK banks, an area that has not yet been widely researched in the academic literature. It highlights a lack of legal certainty in the UK’s laws and regulation around anti-money laundering and argues that the expectations of the FCA exceed both the letter and the spirit of the laws. It suggests that mixed messages disseminated by the FCA have incentivised banks to shift their focus from financial crime risk (i.e. preventing money laundering and terrorist financing, etc.) towards regulatory risk (i.e. the risk of falling foul of regulatory expectations) and proposes a change to the law and regulatory guidance to enhance the level of legal certainty needed for the law to be effective.

The paper makes suggestions for a more practical and risk-based approach to anti-money laundering compliance and for a much-needed change in the law.

It provides unique insight into the due diligence challenges of financial services firms and argues for the FCA to propagate a more risk-based approach to enhanced due diligence.

Given inconsistent results in prior studies, this paper applies the dual process theory to investigate what social media messages yield audience engagement during a political event. It tests how affective cues (emotional valence, intensity and collective self-representation) and cognitive cues (insight, causation, certainty and discrepancy) contribute to public engagement.

The authors created a dataset of more than three million tweets during the 2020 United States (US) presidential elections. Affective and cognitive cues were assessed via sentiment analysis. The hypotheses were tested in negative binomial regressions. The authors also scrutinized a subsample of far-famed Twitter users. The final dataset, scraping code, preprocessing and analysis are available in an open repository.

The authors found the prominence of both affective and cognitive cues. For the overall sample, negativity bias was registered, and the tweet’s emotionality was negatively related to engagement. In contrast, in the sub-sample of tweets from famous users, emotionally charged content produced higher engagement. The role of sentiment decreases when the number of followers grows and ultimately becomes insignificant for Twitter participants with many followers. Collective self-representation (“we-talk”) is consistently associated with more likes, comments and retweets in the overall sample and subsamples.

The authors expand the dominating one-sided perspective to social media message processing focused on the peripheral route and hence affective cues. Leaning on the dual process theory, the authors shed light on the effectiveness of both affective (peripheral route) and cognitive (central route) cues on information appeal and dissemination on Twitter during a political event. The popularity of the tweet’s author moderates these relationships.

The understanding of how to mitigate opportunism in construction projects is still limited and conflicting. The complexity of causalities and interdependence among antecedents of opportunism (transaction characteristics and governance mechanisms) is the major obstacle to current research. This study takes a holistic perspective to explore the different combinations of conditions that lead to high opportunism and low opportunism in project management.

Through 2 phases of the interview and questionnaire survey, the 91 valid survey data were collected from the buyer–seller relationships in construction projects and analyzed by adopting fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.

A single transaction characteristic is rarely sufficient to explain opportunism, and combinations of different transaction characteristics and governance mechanisms (performance ambiguity, asset specificity, buyer's requirement certainty, informal control, and formal control) have different effects on opportunism. In the case of extremely unsatisfactory transaction characteristics, even the combination of formal and informal control cannot prevent high opportunism. The combination including low-formal control and high-asset specificity easily leads to high opportunism. Besides, performance ambiguity is a vital factor in mitigating high opportunism or achieving low opportunism.

Previous studies have always addressed the role of one or some factors independently and separately. This study is one of the first to explore the different combinations of conditions that result in high opportunism and low opportunism in project management based on transaction costs economics and agency theory.