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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a survey instrument to measure three components of students’ perceptions of open and affordable course materials – quality, integration, and experience – and discuss its reliability and predictive validity.

The authors distributed an end-of-semester online survey to students enrolled in sections of 12 courses that adopted OER in Fall 2016, as well as conducting a within-interview survey with the instructors of those courses. The authors calculated the descriptive statistics from the responses to the student survey, as well as examining the inter-item and inter-rater reliability of the instrument. Finally, explored correlations in the data gathered through both the student and faculty surveys were explored.

The authors found that both students and faculty were generally pleased with the quality and experience of using open and affordable digital materials. The authors also found that our three survey subscales had strong inter-item reliability, and that the quality and experience subscales had predictive validity in terms of whether students would choose a traditional or digital text in future courses.

In addition to providing evidence in terms of the full survey instrument’s reliability and predictive validity, factor analysis indicates that a short scale of quality and experience Likert scale items could be used by practitioners to effectively assess satisfaction of digital materials among traditionally aged undergraduate students.

The market for mergers and takeovers, often referred to as the market for corporate control [Manne (1965)], has always attracted the attention of investors and researchers because takeovers represent corporate investment decisions on a scale several times larger than the normal, ongoing, growth‐maintaining capital outlays by the typical value‐maximising firm. Although the theoretical justifications for such corporate actions are reasonably well understood, the true motives for the mergers and the strategies adopted by acquiring firms to consummate them can be complex and diverse in scope. Corporate acquisitions can therefore have widespread effects on the wealth of various groups of agents involved in the market for corporate control.

The aim of the paper is to examine the contribution made by housing‐related third sector organisations (TSOs) in assisting ex‐prisoners to find housing, and the barriers they face in doing so.

An offender survey was used to measure awareness of and engagement with TSOs in eight prisons, alongside qualitative interviews with prisoners, criminal justice staff and TSO representatives.

Despite the involvement of TSOs, securing accommodation for ex‐prisoners remains complex and difficult, largely due to high service demand, housing shortages, budget cuts, and needs assessment and allocations systems which reduce the responsiveness of housing providers to the reducing re‐offending agenda.

The research benefited from a mixed‐method approach which captured the perceptions of service users and professionals. The response rate for the offender survey was low (12 per cent), and the survey findings should be treated with caution.

Local authorities and other housing providers need to be more willing to accept ex‐prisoners as potential service users, and better links need to be made between local homelessness strategies, choice based lettings systems and prisoner resettlement programmes. Providing support services to ex‐offenders may encourage such acceptance and help to maintain the motivation to desist from crime.

Previous research has paid little specific attention to the role of TSOs in (ex)offender housing. This paper addresses this omission by drawing on original empirical research to examine the value of their work in securing accommodation for ex‐prisoners and helping to reduce re‐offending.

Interrelations of writings in a complex field such as studies of science, technology and society, turn out to be highly patterned when data on author co‐citations are statistically analysed and mapped. For both authors and specialities, the maps reveal structures of subject matter and intellectual impact, based on the perceptions of hundreds of citers since 1972. A new tool thus is available to historians and others concerned with a field's intellectual development.

The empirical evidence on mergers and takeovers indicates that positive gains due to mergers and takeovers ac‐crue almost entirely to the target firms. While average abnormal returns to target firms are invariably positive, returns to bidding firms are negative in case of mergers and not significantly different from zero in case of takeovers (see Jensen and Ruback [1983] and De and Mathur in this issue for a review of the empirical evidence). That acquiring firms should offer the shareholders of the target firms such handsome rewards and accept marginal returns for themselves is one of the unresolved problems in the context of mergers and takeovers.

This paper aims to carry out a critical analysis of the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme (ETS) as a complex market solution to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs). Specifically it seeks to examine the financial regulatory infrastructure that will more than likely oversee the Australian ETS, the same regulatory infrastructure which failed to prevent the global financial crisis.

A critical examination of the financialisation of the atmosphere that follows the growth of the financialisation of capitalism when economic activity shifted from production and service sectors to finance. Financialisation of capitalism is supported by capitalist regulation influenced by neo‐liberal doctrines of free markets and small government.

Trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds bailed out large financial institutions that nearly collapsed after unregulated trading in complex financial products that were supposed to hedge future risk. Corporate emissions trading will involve similar financial products. The measurement and reporting of actual emissions to support the Australian ETS also creates challenges for the accountancy profession to provide a workable conceptual framework.

If the currently flawed financial infrastructure required for the GHG emissions trading scheme, no amount of taxpayer funded bailouts will reverse the extreme climate change associated with an environmental catastrophe.

The application of financialisation of monopoly capitalism and capitalist regulation theories to the critical analysis of commoditised GHGs traded as financial products in the proposed Australian ETS.

In mid-1992, Christine Olsen, the chief financial officer (CFO) of this large CAD/CAM equipment manufacturer, must decide on the magnitude of the firm's dividend payout. A subsidiary question is whether the firm should embark on a campaign of corporate-image advertising and change its corporate name to reflect its new outlook. The case serves as an omnibus review of the many practical aspects of the dividend decision, including (1) signaling effects, (2) clientele effects, and (3) finance and investment implications of increasing dividend payout.

The purpose of this paper is to review several major components of hostage negotiation including: the different types of hostage situations; the prediction of the behavioral patterns of the hostage taker; the collection and the use of police intelligence in hostage incidents; and the application of forensic psychology during the hostage negotiations process.

Emphasis on the social psychological aspects of creating attitude change and gaining compliance with the hostage taker are introduced to assist in developing an effective crisis communication approach during the hostage negotiations process.

The paper also discusses trends in hostage negotiation strategies within incidents of domestic violence, suicide by cop, school shootings, and suicide/homicide bombings.

Limitations and advancements in the field of hostage negotiations are also discussed as well as suggestions for the use of tactical entry to resolve unsuccessful hostage negotiations.

Explores the current trend of “suicide by cop,” but also introduces the concept of homicide by cop in relation to police shootings.

The use of criminal psychology in developing hostage negotiation strategies to engage hostage takers with personality disorders, PTSD, paranoid schizophrenia, and suicidal depression is also discussed.

An experimental study was conducted in a sample of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and one of comparable large company managers to examine three research questions: Why do some individuals choose riskier ventures than do others? Do managers and successful entrepreneurs perceive new venture risk and potential differently? What accounts for differences, if any, in their decision‐making behavior? The findings are equally interesting for the effects we found and did not find. We found that differences in risk propensity and in situational factors like the market competencies brought to a particular venture influence risky new venture decision‐making; that perceptions of new venture risk and potential differ between managers and successful entrepreneurs, though in a direction opposite to that we hypothesized; and that individual differences, rather than group‐level differences, are primarily responsible for the degree of risk taken by managers and successful entrepreneurs. Taken together, our results call for further research at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface and research into differences between managers and entrepreneurs, using samples of highly successful entrepreneurs and comparable managers in established firms.