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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This paper aims to examine the nature and extent of disclosure on the use of big data by online platform companies and how these disclosures address and discharge stakeholder accountability.

Content analysis of annual reports and data policy documents of 100 online platform companies were used for this study. More specifically, the study develops a comprehensive big data disclosure framework to assess the nature and extent of disclosures provided in corporate reports. This framework also assists in evaluating the effect of the size of the company, industry and country in which they operate on disclosures.

The analysis reveals that most companies made limited disclosure on how they manage big data. Only two of the 100 online platform companies have provided moderate disclosures on big data related issues. The focus of disclosure by the online platform companies is more on data regulation compliance and privacy protection, but significantly less on the accountability and ethical issues of big data use. More specifically, critical issues, such as stakeholder engagement, breaches of customer information and data reporting and controlling mechanisms are largely overlooked in current disclosures. The analysis confirms that current attention has been predominantly given to powerful stakeholders such as regulators as a result of compliance pressure while the accountability pressure has yet to keep up the pace.

The study findings may be limited by the use of a new accountability disclosure index and the specific focus on online platform companies.

Although big data permeates, the number of users and uses grow and big data use has become more ingrained into society, this study provides evidence that ethical and accountability issues persist, even among the largest online companies. The findings of this study improve the understanding of the current state of online companies’ reporting practices on big data use, particularly the issues and gaps in the reporting process, which will help policymakers and standard setters develop future data disclosure policies.

From these findings, the study improves the understanding of the current state of online companies’ reporting practices on big data use, particularly the issues and gaps in the reporting process – which are helpful for policymakers and standard setters to develop data disclosure policies.

This study provides an analysis of ethical and social issues surrounding big data accountability, an emerging but increasingly important area that needs urgent attention and more research. It also adds a new disclosure dimension to the existing accountability literature and provides practical suggestions to balance the interaction between online platform companies and their stakeholders to promote the responsible use of big data.

In recent years accounting standard setters and professional bodies have issued directives aimed at improving the transparency and accessibility of financial reports compiled by government agencies. This study examines the availability and accessibility of local government financial reports on the Internet for a sample of 300 U.S. municipalities of varying size. Results indicate that provision of financial reports is more prominent among larger cities. Cities with higher income per capita and higher levels of accounting disclosure are also more likely to provide financial reports on the Internet. The accessibility of the financial data reported on the Internet is positively related to the number of residents, resident income per capita, and level of debt and financial position of the municipality.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the limitations and potential bias in securitized residential mortgage data and examine the importance of such data issues for typical studies of residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) market and the financial crisis.

We use trustee data on mortgage characteristics provided by BlackBox Logic – the BBx data – to study the extent to which undisclosed mortgage characteristics distort the available data and impact risk analysis of RMBS collateral pools.

We illustrate that substantial amounts of loan characteristic data in crucial fields like occupancy, property type, loan purpose and FICO are missing from the trustee data. The frequency of missing values is staggering, ranging from just under 9 per cent for property type to 29 per cent for FICO, up to almost 85 per cent for originator name, all variables used in recent studies. The omissions are correlated to some degree with the securitization sponsor and even more dramatically with the identity of the deal trustee.

Analysis of RMBS collateral should be built not on the entirety of mortgage databases, but on stratified samples and should otherwise control for important sponsor and trustee fixed effects.

The revisions for Regulation AB which require loan-level disclosure should be adopted to standardize mortgage disclosure.

This is the first paper that examines selection bias in loan characteristics relied upon for a wide variety of mortgage market research that has substantially affected policy decisions in the post-crisis era.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss implications of human-technology interaction in organizational change, especially where mobile phones are introduced to replace paper-based reporting.

The paper employs a case study approach, focusing on implementation of mobile technology for health (mHealth) solutions to support remote data communication, between health facilities and a district health office (DHO), in Malawi.

The findings suggest that mobile phones are relevant to parts of multi-stage tasks such as data reporting, which comprise compilation, transportation, and digitization of data, and delivery of feedback. Consequently, innovation due to the introduction of mobile phones, is found in their interaction with other artefacts (paper, desktop computers, etc.), and existing paper-centric and emerging work practices.

Although lessons from this study could be transported across contexts, practitioners, and researchers should pay particular attention to contextual differences.

In accounting for the mutual shaping between technology and context/work practices the paper demonstrates that mHealth innovation demands significant practical work.

mHealth research is often preoccupied with capabilities of mobile devices. First, the authors account for interaction between artefacts, existing, and emerging use contexts, and the use process, at multiple levels of organization. Through this, the authors argue for a need to seriously consider idiosyncrasies of artefacts and tasks at hand, as well as distributed affordances across artefacts, in mHealth implementations. Second, the authors argue that contrary to the general focus on mobile phones as tools for supporting people on the move, their relevance might actually be found in reducing people’s mobility.

In the past, people were usually seen as the weakest link in the IT security chain. However, this view has changed in recent years and people are no longer seen only as a problem, but also as part of the solution. In research, this change is reflected in the fact that people are enabled to report security incidents that they have detected. During this reporting process, however, it is important to ensure that the reports are submitted with the highest possible data quality. This paper aims to provide a process-driven quality improvement approach for human-as-a-security-sensor information.

This work builds upon existing approaches for structured reporting of security incidents. In the first step, relevant data quality dimensions and influencing factors are defined. Based on this, an approach for quality improvement is proposed. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, it is prototypically implemented and evaluated using an exemplary use case.

In this paper, a process-driven approach is proposed, which allows improving the data quality by analyzing the similarity of incidents. It is shown that this approach is feasible and leads to better data quality with real-world data.

The originality of the approach lies in the fact that data quality is already improved during the reporting of an incident. In addition, approaches from other areas, such as recommender systems, are applied innovatively to the area of the human-as-a-security-sensor.

The paper aims to provide a critical review of how variations in the conceptualization and contextualization of hate crime across US cities might impact how their individual law enforcement agencies collect hate crime data. Media reports and political discourses present hate crime as a prevalent problem in the USA. However, this representation of hate crime in the public sphere is not reflected in the relatively low national numbers of hate crimes published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Drawing primarily on the national hate crime data for the period 2008–2018, this author conducted a secondary research study of the concept, context, extent and law enforcement collection of hate crime data in five cities in the USA.

This paper is a product of some of the findings of the study, which include the definition of hate crime at the federal, state and city levels and the contextualization of hate crimes at these levels. The findings show inconsistencies in how the five cities and associated law enforcement agencies conceptualize hate crime and in how they collect and report hate crime data at local and national levels.

Through its analysis of how five US cities and the associated law enforcement agencies interpret and respond to hate crime data collection, with recommendations of best practices for hate crime data collection by law enforcement agencies, the paper contributes to the academic and nonacademic debate on hate crime.

The use of technology in Saudi Arabian higher education is constantly evolving. With the support of the 2030 Saudi vision, many research studies have started covering learning analytics and Big Data in the Saudi Arabian higher education. Examining learning analytics in higher education institutions promise transforming the learning experience to maximize students' learning potential. With the thousands of students' transactions recorded in various learning management systems (LMS) in Saudi educational institutions, the need to explore and research learning analytics in Saudi Arabia has caught the interest of scholars and researchers regionally and internationally. This chapter explores a Saudi private university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and examines its rich learning analytics and discovers the knowledge behind it. More than 300,000 records of LMS analytical data were collected from a consecutive 4-year historic data. Romero, Ventura, and Garcia (2008) educational data mining process was applied to collect and analyze the analytical reports. Statistical and trend analysis were applied to examine and interpret the collected data. The study has also collected lecturers' testimonies to support the collected analytical data. The study revealed a transformative pedagogy that impact course instructional design and students' engagement.

Information infrastructures can enable or constrain how companies pursue their visions of sustainability reporting and help address the urgent need to understand how corporate activity affects sustainability outcomes and how socio-ecological challenges affect corporate activity. The paper examines the relationship between sustainability reporting information infrastructures and sustainability reporting practice.

The paper mobilises a socio-technical perspective and the conception of infrastructure, the socio-technical arrangement of technical artifacts and social routines, to engage with a qualitative dataset comprised of interview and documentary evidence on the development and construction of sustainability reporting information.

The results detail how sustainability reporting information infrastructures are used by companies and depict the difficulties faced in generating reliable sustainability data. The findings illustrate the challenges and measures undertaken by entities to embed automation and integration, and to enhance sustainability data quality. The findings provide insight into how infrastructures constrain and support sustainability reporting practices.

The paper explains how infrastructures shape sustainability reporting practices, and how infrastructures are shaped by regulatory demands and costs. Companies have developed “uneven” infrastructures supporting legislative requirements, whilst infrastructures supporting non-legislative sustainability reporting remain underdeveloped. Consequently, infrastructures supporting specific legislation have developed along unitary pathways and are often poorly integrated with infrastructures supporting other sustainability reporting areas. Infrastructures developed around legislative requirements are not necessarily constrained by financial reporting norms and do not preclude specific sustainability reporting visions. On the contrary, due to regulation, infrastructure supporting disclosures that offer an “inside out” perspective on sustainability reporting is often comparatively well developed.

This paper aims to examine the existence of a transparency gap between voluntary external sustainability reporting and internal sustainability performance of an organisation arising from the operationalisation of transparency as an instrumental tool.

This study combined an analysis of a firm’s sustainability report (secondary data) with a qualitative case study data (primary data comprising interviews, meetings and internal documents) to understand how the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sustainability reporting guidelines are applied in practice.

By comparing what is reported with a range of primary case study data, this study finds evidence of transparency gaps, particularly in terms of the quality of measurement of sustainability performance, the materiality of issues covered and the completeness of the report. This study posits that voluntary disclosures following the GRI guidelines (transparency technique) shape the external expression of acceptable corporate behaviour (transparency norm) that is nevertheless at odds with actual behaviour or performance.

The findings indicate the importance of mandatory sustainability reporting requirements that facilitate accountability to all key stakeholders and that are externally assured and enforced. Such requirements might take the form of standards that put boundaries on judgement and address material sustainable development impacts and that are accompanied by implementation guidance. Non-financial assurance practices must be developed to cover adherence to reporting principles and processes.

Transparency gaps that result from voluntary disclosure guidelines or standards being used to imply a transparency norm may undermine accountability for the impacts of the organisation and hinder alignment of business models and corporate strategies with sustainable development.

The paper contributes to a theoretical understanding of transparency as a form of self-regulation and has implications for the further development of sustainability reporting standards.