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An understanding of the role of decision-making has been emphasised since the seminal works on human information processing and professional judgements by accountants. The interest in these topics has been reignited by the increasing digitisation of the financial reporting and auditing processes. Whilst the behavioural research on accounting is well-established, the application of seminal works in cognitive psychology and behavioural finance is lacking, especially from recent research endeavours. The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of theories relating to accounting behavioural research by evaluating them against the theories of cognitive psychology.

Using theory synthesis, this research draws seemingly isolated strands of research into a coherent framework, underpinned by cognitive psychology.

Evidence from accounting and auditing behavioural research is largely consistent with the psychology and finance research on cognitive limitations and errors. There remains a lacuna in accounting behavioural research on debiasing techniques. Such research, if underpinned by a single, cohesive theoretical framework, is likely to have practical relevance.

The current research has theoretical implications for the accounting decision-making and uncertainty research. Areas for future research, based on identified gaps in the current accounting behavioural research, are also proposed.

Authenticity has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, leading to a rich but confused literature. This study, a review, aims to compare the psychology and sociology/tourism definitions of authenticity to clarify the concept. From a psychological perspective, authenticity is a mental appraisal of an object or experience as valued leading to feelings and summative judgements (such as satisfaction or perceived value). In objective authenticity, a person values the object due to belief in an expert’s opinion, constructive authenticity relies on socially constructed values, while existential authenticity is based on one’s self-identity. The resultant achievement of a valued goal, such as seeing a valued object, leads to feelings of pleasure. Sociological definitions are similar but based on different theoretical antecedent causes of constructed and existential authenticity. The paper further discusses the use of theory in tourism and the project to develop tourism as a discipline. This project is considered unlikely to be successful and in turn, as argued, it is more useful to apply theory from other disciplines in a multidisciplinary manner. The results emphasise that it is necessary for tourism researchers to understand the origins and development of the concepts they use and their various definitions.

The purpose of this study was to examine how well a strength-based program grounded in positive psychology principles can advance the practical critical thinking skills of those pursuing the teacher training course.

This study used a single-group pre-test post-test design with 35 teacher-trainees from the Bachelor of Education course. The two-and-a-half-week strength-based program used the values in action survey to identify strengths. Pre- and post-test scores, measured with the Cornell Critical Thinking Test – Level Z, underwent Statistical Package for Social Sciences analysis including paired samples t-test for subcomponent and overall composite analysis.

Analysis of the pre- and post-test scores demonstrated a statistical significance in the critical thinking scores obtained by the teacher-trainees. Post-test scores were consistently significant. Out of the elements of critical thinking, induction, meaning, observation and credibility were more prominent. Deduction and assumption identification were also having a significant effect.

Most critical thinking programs focus on evaluating specific teaching methods for improving critical thinking skills. In education, positive psychology studies often center on students’ well-being, attention spans and academic success, aligning with wellness programs. Despite the importance of strengths in positive psychology, there is a lack of research on using a strength-based approach to boost critical thinking skills. This study aims to enhance teacher-trainees’ critical thinking by leveraging their individual strengths, moving away from traditional instructional strategies.

This paper describes how financial professionals' behavioral biases influence their financial forecast and decision-making process. Most of the earlier studies are focused on well-developed financial markets, and little is researched about financial professionals, such as institutional investors, portfolio managers, investment advisors, financial analysts, etc., in emerging markets.

An expert-validated questionnaire measure four prominent behavioral biases and Indian financial professionals' rational decision-making process. The final sample consists of 274 valid responses using the purposive sampling technique. IBM SPSS and AMOS structural equation modeling (SEM) software are used to build measurement and structural models, multivariate analysis including regression, factor analysis, etc.

The results provide empirical insights into the relationship between behavioral biases and the decision-making process. The results suggest that the structural path model closely fits the sample data. The presence of behavioral biases indicates that financial professionals' forecasting and decision-making is not always rational but bounded rational or irrational due to these factors. Furthermore, these biases (except overconfidence bias) have a markedly significant and positive relationship with irrational decision-making.

It is critical to eradicate these psychological errors, but awareness and attentiveness toward behavioral biases may help financial professionals to make informed decisions. Investors can improve their portfolio decisions and investments by recognizing their judgment errors and focusing on specific investment strategies to mitigate the impact of these biases. It is necessary to incorporate behavioral insights while developing training techniques for financial professionals. Rules of thumb, visual tools, financial coaching and implementing social-cultural elements in training programs enable financial professionals to develop simple, engaging, appealing and customized approaches for their clients.

This novel study is the first of this kind of research that examines the relationship between financial professionals' behavioral biases and rational decision-making process. This study significantly and remarkably provides insights into irrationality in financial professionals' decision-making.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of different brand positions (underdog vs top dog) and comparative advertising on consumers’ brand attitudes. Additionally, this study also aims to demonstrate the effects of inspiration, self-relevance and empathy on the relationship between brand positioning and comparative advertising.

A two-by-three factorial design was employed with brand positions (underdog vs top dog) and three types of comparative advertising (noncomparative, indirect comparative and direct comparative) as the independent variables. Inspiration serves as the mediator, while self-relevance and empathy act as moderators and brand attitude is the dependent variable.

The results show that different brand positions significantly affect brand attitudes, with respondents having a better brand attitude toward the underdog brand. Brand attitude is partially mediated by inspiration. Self-relevance moderates the relationship between brand positioning and brand attitude. However, brand positioning, comparative advertising and empathy do not have interaction effects.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the effect of psychological variables on brand positioning and comparative advertising.

The results suggest that the underdog setting requires a real and honest story because consumers will spot a fake underdog story, which will damage consumer trust in the brand and harm the brand image.

There is a lack of research using psychological variables to demonstrate the effect of being the underdog brand. This study contributes to the literature by employing psychological variables to illustrate the effect of underdog positioning. These findings can help brands develop branding positioning strategies.

This article aims to systematically review the literature published in recognized journals focused on cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their effect on investment management activities and market efficiency. It also includes some of the research work on the origins and foundations of behavioral finance, and how this has grown substantially to become an established and particular subject of study in its own right. The study also aims to provide future direction to the researchers working in this field.

For doing research synthesis, a systematic literature review (SLR) approach was applied considering research studies published within the time period, i.e. 1970–2021. This study attempted to accomplish a critical review of 176 studies out of 256 studies identified, which were published in reputable journals to synthesize the existing literature in the behavioral finance domain-related explicitly to cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their effect on investment management activities and market efficiency as well as on the origins and foundations of behavioral finance.

This review reveals that investors often use cognitive heuristics to reduce the risk of losses in uncertain situations, but that leads to errors in judgment; as a result, investors make irrational decisions, which may cause the market to overreact or underreact – in both situations, the market becomes inefficient. Overall, the literature demonstrates that there is currently no consensus on the usefulness of cognitive heuristics in the context of investment management activities and market efficiency. Therefore, a lack of consensus about this topic suggests that further studies may bring relevant contributions to the literature. Based on the gaps analysis, three major categories of gaps, namely theoretical and methodological gaps, and contextual gaps, are found, where research is needed.

The skillful understanding and knowledge of the cognitive heuristic-driven biases will help the investors, financial institutions and policymakers to overcome the adverse effect of these behavioral biases in the stock market. This article provides a detailed explanation of cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their influence on investment management activities and market efficiency, which could be very useful for finance practitioners, such as an investor who plays at the stock exchange, a portfolio manager, a financial strategist/advisor in an investment firm, a financial planner, an investment banker, a trader/broker at the stock exchange or a financial analyst. But most importantly, the term also includes all those persons who manage corporate entities and are responsible for making their financial management strategies.

Currently, no recent study exists, which reviews and evaluates the empirical research on cognitive heuristic-driven biases displayed by investors. The current study is original in discussing the role of cognitive heuristic-driven biases in investment management activities and market efficiency as well as the history and foundations of behavioral finance by means of research synthesis. This paper is useful to researchers, academicians, policymakers and those working in the area of behavioral finance in understanding the role that cognitive heuristic plays in investment management activities and market efficiency.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the literature on information elicitation. The authors investigated the impact of social influence strategies on eyewitness recall performance. Specifically, the authors examined the effect of social influence techniques (Cialdini, 2007) on recall performance (Experiment 1) and conducted a follow-up experiment to examine the incremental effect of social proof on the report everything cognitive interview mnemonic (Experiment 2).

Participants watched a video depicting vandalism (Experiment 1: N = 174) or a verbal altercation (Experiment 2: N = 128) and were asked to recall the witnessed event. Experiment 1: Participants were assigned randomly to one of six conditions: control (open-ended prompt), engage and explain (interview ground rules), consistency (signing an agreement to work diligently), reciprocity (given water and food), authority (told of interviewer’s training) and social proof (shown transcript from an exemplar participant). Experiment 2: The authors used a 2 (social proof: present, absent) × 2 (report everything: present, absent) between-participants design.

Across both experiments, participants exposed to the social proof tactic (i.e. compared to a model exemplar) spoke longer and recalled more correct details than participants not exposed to the social proof tactic. In Experiment 2, participants interviewed with the report everything mnemonic also spoke longer, recalled more correct details, more incorrect details and provided slightly more confabulations than those not interviewed with the report everything mnemonic.

The findings have practical value for police investigators and other professionals who conduct interviews (e.g. military personnel, doctors obtaining information from patients). Interviewers can incorporate social proof in their interviewing practices to help increase the amount and accuracy of information obtained.

The shape of a product plays a crucial role in shaping consumer behavior. Despite the voluminous research on factors influencing consumers’ shape preferences, there remains a limited understanding of how the busy mindset, a mentality increasingly emphasized by marketing campaigns, works. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between a busy mindset and the preference for angular-shaped versus circular-shaped products and brand logos.

This research consists of seven experimental studies using various shape stimuli, distinct manipulations of busy mindset, different assessments of shape preference and samples drawn from multiple countries.

The findings reveal that a busy mindset leads to a preference for angular shapes over circular ones by amplifying the need for uniqueness. In addition, these effects are attenuated when products are scarce.

This research represents one of the pioneering efforts to study the role of a busy mindset on consumers’ aesthetic preferences. Beyond yielding insights for practitioners into visual marketing, this research contributes to the theories on the busy mindset and shape preference.

This paper aims to use the cognitive appraisal theory to investigate the effects of brand engagement and materialism on the positive emotions of joy and excitement evoked by a product at different stages of the purchase process.

Two complementary studies were conducted to achieve the research objectives. Study 1 used a longitudinal design, examining the pre-purchase stage and a moment shortly after the purchase. Study 2 adopted a cross-sectional approach, focusing on the post-purchase stage. Relationships among variables were analyzed through hierarchical regression and moderation analyses.

The findings indicate that materialism is not significantly associated with consumers’ positive product-evoked emotions (joy and excitement) before and shortly after purchase. At these two stages, brand engagement predicts positive emotions. In the post-purchase stage, where materialism is weakly related to joy and excitement, a robust positive link exists between brand engagement and positive product-evoked emotions. Moreover, higher levels of materialism reduce the experience of joy and excitement among participants with high levels of brand engagement.

Experiencing joy and excitement is crucial in consumer behavior. However, little is known about the determinants of these emotions in the consumption context, especially concerning internal consumption-related factors and different stages of the purchase process. This paper contributes to the field by shedding light on the role of brand engagement and materialism in the experience of positive product-evoked emotions. The findings provide evidence that brand engagement significantly enhances consumers’ positive product-evoked emotions, highlighting its importance in consumer behavior research.

We argue that a fundamental issue regarding how to search and how to switch between different cognitive modes lies in the decision rules that influence the dynamics of learning and exploration. We examine the search logics underlying these decision rules and propose conceptual prompts that can be applied mentally or computationally to aid managers’ decision-making.

By applying Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) modeling to simulate agents’ interaction with dynamic environments, we compared the patterns and performance of selected MAB algorithms under different configurations of environmental conditions.

We develop three conceptual prompts. First, the simple heuristic-based exploration strategy works well in conditions of low environmental variability and few alternatives. Second, an exploration strategy that combines simple and de-biasing heuristics is suitable for most dynamic and complex decision environments. Third, the uncertainty-based exploration strategy is more applicable in the condition of high environmental unpredictability as it can more effectively recognize deviated patterns.

This study contributes to emerging research on using algorithms to develop novel concepts and combining heuristics and algorithmic intelligence in strategic decision-making.

This study offers insights that there are different possibilities for exploration strategies for managers to apply conceptually and that the adaptability of cognitive-distant search may be underestimated in turbulent environments.

Drawing on insights from machine learning and cognitive psychology research, we demonstrate the fitness of different exploration strategies in different dynamic environmental configurations by comparing the different search logics that underlie the three MAB algorithms.