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The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of expectancy and valence in the decision policies of entrepreneurs when choosing whether or not to persist with their current venture.

Using a conjoint experiment design, 105 entrepreneurs made a series of decisions based on a common set of attributes. The decisions were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling to determine how the attributes were weighed in the decision policies.

The results indicate that entrepreneurs use expectancy and valences and interestingly, a negative interaction between expectancy and valences in their persistence decision policies.

An understanding of how individuals make decisions may be of great value to entrepreneurs as they consider the decision to persist with a venture in the face of adversity.

Previous research has focused on the decision to start a business. This study adds to the literature by considering the important decision of whether to persist with a business or not. The results provide interesting insights into why and how entrepreneurs choose to persist and contributes to the literature on expectancy theory.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

The aim of the paper is to analyse female and male loan officers' (LOs) risk aversion as they assess different types of small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) loan applications.

The data were gathered from a sample of 75 Swedish LOs, using the repertory grid technique and related questions. The data were analysed statistically.

The findings demonstrate that female LOs focus more on collateral (used as a proxy for risk aversion) in their evaluations of first-time loan applications than male LOs. However, the findings also suggest that there are no significant differences between the two groups as far as risk aversion when they evaluate additional loan applications. The other variables controlled for (age, tenure, insight, education, and location) did not significantly affect the LOs' risk aversion.

The study might have benefited from the use of complementary data collection approaches. Access to actual assessment and decision-making procedures could have increased the understanding of female and male LOs' attitudes toward risk.

The findings suggest that by the use of female-male LO teams, banks may achieve more balanced assessments of SMEs' loan applications.

To the authors' knowledge, the literature has not explicitly addressed risk aversion among female and male LOs with respect to different types of bank loans. Moreover, the authors investigated risk aversion in the context of standardised assessments procedures used to reduce exposure to credit risk.

We have long been obsessed with the dream of creating intelligent machines. This vision can be traced back to Greek civilization, and the notion that mortals somehow can create machines that think has persisted throughout history. Until this decade these illusions have borne no substance. The birth of the computer in the 1940s did cause a resurgence of the cybernaut idea, but the computer's role was primarily one of number‐crunching and realists soon came to respect the enormous difficulties in crafting machines that could accomplish even the simplest of human tasks.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

Selected current and recent work in the area of cognitive modelling is reviewed. Particular attention is paid to user models (that is, the model held by a system of a user). The relevance of this work to information retrieval is assessed and some attempts to include user models in IR systems are discussed. Implications are drawn for future work in IR.

Corporate financial communications concern public and private disclosure (Holland, 2005). This paper aims to explain how banks developed financial communications and how problems emerged in the global financial crisis. It explores policy responses.

Bank cases reveal construction and destruction of the social, knowledge and economic world of financial communications over two periods.

In the 1990s, learning about financial communications by a “dominant coalition” (Cyert, March, 1963) in bank top management was stimulated by gradual change. The management learnt how to accumulate social and cultural capital and developed “habitus” for disclosure (Bourdieu, 1986). From 2000, rapid change and secrecy factors accelerated bank internalisation of shareholder wealth maximising values, turning “habitus” in “market for information” (MFI) (Barker, 1998) into a “psychic prison” (Morgan,1986), creating riskier bank cultures (Schein, 2004) and constraining learning.

The paper introduces sociological concepts to banking research and financial disclosures to increase the understanding about financial information and bank culture and about how regulation can avoid crises. Limitations reflect the small number of banks and range of qualitative data.

Regulators will have to make visible the change processes, new contexts and knowledge and connections to bank risk and performance through improved regulator action and bank public disclosure.

“Masking” and rituals (Andon and Free, 2012) restricted bank disclosure and weakened governance and market pressures on banks. These factors mediated bank failure and survival in 2008, as “psychic prisons” “fell apart”. Bank and MFI agents experienced a “cosmology episode” (Weick, 1988). Financial communications structures failed but were reconstructed by regulators.

The paper shows how citizens require transparency and contested accountability to democratise finance capitalism. Otherwise, problems will recur.