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The purpose of this research is to understand how accounting information mobilises stakeholder salience at an industry level.

A case study method using an explanation building approach was applied to gather information surrounding dairy industry stakeholder uses of accounting information to communicate their salience, in the historical context, leading to, and the events surrounding the milk price “war” in Australia. The Mitchell et al. (1997) stakeholder salience framework was used to advance our understanding of the different ways accounting can be mobilized by stakeholders with different types of salience attributes, at an industry level.

This empirical analysis produces two insights into the relation between accounting and stakeholder salience. First, there is evidence as to how accounting information impacted on stakeholder salience at an industry level by demonstrating how accounting information (in)directly communicated and justified the increase of a stakeholder’s level of salience. Second, the Mitchell et al. (1997) model is extended by attributing levels of importance to each stakeholder attribute. It was found that, in this setting, power was the most salient attribute of the three, usurping legitimacy and urgency, leading to the outcomes observed.

This paper acknowledged the usual method limitations related to this style of qualitative research, including investigator bias and lack of statistical generalization. In addition, a second set of limitations critiques the paper’s operating framework. While the Mitchell et al. (1997) stakeholder salience model proved to be a suitable choice for this research, it is limited in the way in which stakeholder attributes are presented and used to identify stakeholders. In addition, further light may be provided on the distinctions between the different magnitudes of power, legitimacy and urgency between stakeholders after suggesting that they are not equally weighted.

The milk price “war” remains a high-profile discussion amongst the general public. This research contributes to a better understanding of how different players (stakeholders) have their salience claims mobilized through accounting information. Practitioners in the dairy industry might reflect on the findings to enhance their legitimacy pursuits in future negotiations with their counter-parties, and better deploy accounting to achieve the same.

The findings speak more broadly to notions of social equity in stakeholder relations, for the production and distribution of a product that is ubiquitously used in society (dairy – milk). The findings from this study therefore have potential to assist policymakers better understand the strategies adopted by stakeholders to impose their influence and defend their claims in a public forum, using accounting information.

The authors contend that the article provides evidence at an industry level, that is lacking in extant management accounting research (Collier, 2000). To this extent, an original contribution is claimed. The paper is also valuable to management accounting and management researchers studying stakeholder salience, and is one of the first to investigate this issue at an industry level, as well as express how accounting mobilises this salience.

Pay what you want (PWYW) is a participative pricing mechanism that permits customers complete freedom to choose prices. PWYW literature reports the influence of external reference price (ERP) on customers' price decisions and payments. The current research examines the influence of ERP presence, salience and understanding at the seller level by analysing customers' perceptions of seller price image dimensions and purchase intentions.

Study 1 tests the impact of ERP presence and salience in controlled lab settings while Study 2 takes this investigation further by including the moderating effect of ERP understanding on seller price image dimensions and purchase intentions in online settings.

Results illustrate the positive impact of ERP presence on all seller price image dimensions excluding the perceived price level. Perceived price fairness mediates the impact of ERP presence on perceived value. ERP salience positively impacts price processability. ERP presence and salience attached to it positively impact customers' purchase intentions through seller price image dimensions.

This is possibly the first paper to investigate the ERP effect on seller price image dimensions in a PWYW context that lacks fixed posted prices.

This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak.

This study used a triangulation of research methods by comparing public relations materials, media coverage, and public opinion. The data were collected from a federal government web site, national newspapers, and national polls.

The data revealed a positive relationship between information subsidy attention and media attention to the H1N1 disease as well as the severity attribute. The salience of the severity attribute in information subsidies was linked with increased H1N1 salience in media coverage, extending the testing of the compelling-arguments hypothesis to an agenda-building context. However, there was no association between salience of the severity attribute and public risk perceptions.

The study provides evidence for public relations effectiveness. However, the limited influence of the severity frame on the public's risk perception suggests a gap between news coverage and the public's view. Framing that effectively empowers the public to engage in desired behavior should be further studied for the success of a public health campaign. The study is limited to examining the severity attribute. A future study should pay more attention to different issue attributes or other frames. The media sample was limited to newspapers and thus lacks generalizability.

The study contributes to public relations scholarship by demonstrating how information subsidies influence media agendas and public opinion in a health communication context. The public health authorities’ role in influencing media agenda should be stressed.

Guided by the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS), this article identifies significant predictors that impact individuals seeking COVID-19 information. People with different political ideologies read contradictory information about the COVID-19 pandemic. However, how political ideology may affect COVID-19 information seeking remains unclear. This study explores the major information channels for individuals with different political ideologies to seek COVID-19 information. It further examines how political ideologies influence CMIS's effectiveness in predicting online health information-seeking.

This study collected 394 completed survey responses from adults living in the United States after the 2020 lockdown. ANOVA analyses revealed the differences in salience, beliefs, information carrier characteristics, utilities and information-seeking actions between Liberals and Conservatives. Regression analyses discovered variables that predict Liberals' and Conservatives' online health information seeking.

Results suggest that the internet is the top channel for COVID-19 information seeking. Compared to Conservatives, Liberals report more COVID-19 information-seeking actions. Liberals also express stronger salience, perceive higher trustworthiness of online COVID-19 information, are more likely to think of seeking online COVID-19 information as useful and helpful and report more substantial efficacy to mitigate the risk. Most CMIS variables predict Liberals' information seeking; however, only salience significantly predicts Conservatives' information seeking.

This article indicates that CMIS should include political ideology to refine its prediction of information seeking. These findings offer practical implications for designing health messages, enhancing information distribution and reducing the public's uncertainty.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2022-0436.

This paper synthesizes existing experimental research in the area of investor perceptions and offers directions for future research. Investor-related experimental research has grown substantially, especially in the last decade, as it has made valuable contributions in establishing causal links, examining underlying process measures, and examining areas with little available data. Within this review, I examine 121 papers and identify three broad categories that affect investor perceptions: information format, investor features, and disclosure credibility. Information format describes how investors are influenced by information salience, information labeling, reporting and accounting complexity, financial statement recognition, explanatory disclosures, and proposed disclosure changes. Investor features describes investors’ use of heuristics, investor preferences, and the effect of investor experience. Disclosure credibility is influenced by external and internal assurance, management credibility, disclosure characteristics, and management incentives. Using this framework, I summarize the existing research and identify areas that would benefit from additional research.

This study proposes a framework based on salience theory and shows that focusing on one type of risk (idiosyncratic or systemic) can explain overpricing of securities ex ante, and resales at low prices during crisis periods.

The author consider an overlapping generations (OLG) model where each generation lives for two periods and there is no population growth. Agents (investors) start their lives with an endowment W > 0 and have mean-variance utility. They invest their endowment when young and consume when old. Each period, the young investors optimally choose their portfolio from different risky assets acquired from the old generation, all assumed to be in fixed supply.

The author show that investor salience bias can explain excess volatility of asset prices and the resulting fire-sales in periods of financial turmoil. A change in salience – from one component (idiosyncratic) to the other (systemic) – will generate excess volatility. Interestingly, higher risk aversion generally exacerbates the excess volatility of prices. Moreover, the model predicts that if a big systemic shock hits the financial system, due to salience bias the price of systemic assets falls sharply. This relates to the observed fire-sales of assets during the global financial crisis.

The proposed model and results suggest that there may be a scope for intervention in financial markets during turbulences. In terms of ex ante policies the study suggests that investors and regulator should use better risk assessment technologies.

This is the first study constructing a tractable model based on the argument that investor salience may exacerbate the excess volatility of prices during financial downturns. The author relate salience to two types of risk; idiosyncratic and systemic and assume that investors' risk perception is biased towards the type of risk that is currently salient based on prior beliefs or past data. The author show that the diversification fallacy of the precrisis period, where seemingly safe assets were overpriced, can be explained by agents overweighing idiosyncratic risk and ignoring systemic risk.

This paper synthesizes the extant research on the outcome effect in the accounting domain, focusing primarily on the context of performance evaluation. It reviews the current state of our knowledge about this phenomenon, including its underlying cognitive and motivational causes, the contexts in which the outcome effect is observed, the factors that influence its various manifestations, and ways in which undesirable outcome effects can be mitigated. It also considers various perspectives about the extent to which outcome effects represent undesirable judgmental bias, and whether this distinction is necessary to motivate research on this topic. The paper is intended to motivate and facilitate future research into the effects of outcome knowledge on judgment in the accounting context. Therefore, we also identify important unanswered questions and discuss opportunities for future research throughout the paper. These include additional consideration of instances in which the outcome effect is reflective of bias, how this bias can be effectively mitigated, ways in which outcome information influences judgment (regardless of whether this influence is considered normative), and how the underlying causes of the outcome effect operate singly and jointly to bring about the outcome effect. We also consider ways that future research can contribute to practice by determining how to encourage evaluators to retain and incorporate the relevant information conveyed by outcomes, while avoiding the inappropriate use of outcome information, and by enhancing external validity to increase the generalizability of experimental results to scenarios frequently encountered in practice.

Based on the concept of information salience, the research investigates the factors that might drive potential differences in consumers' preferences between offers framed as free with purchase or as a bundle.

Four experiments examined how participants' preferences for bundled offers or free-with-purchase offers varied as a function of the perceived benefits to be obtained from the supplementary products (studies 1a and 1b) and identified participants' sensitivity to the price of the supplementary component as a mediator of the framing effect of a promotional offer (study 2) and the provision of information facilitating the drawing of comparisons as the boundary condition constraining the effectiveness of a free-with-purchase offer (study 3).

Results show that a bundled offer is preferable to a free-with-purchase offer when the supplementary product provides a high-level rather than a low-level benefit and identify price sensitivity as an underlying mechanism behind the observed effect. Furthermore, consumers' sensitivity to the value of the focal product in the deal brought to their attention by comparative information makes a fair charge for a relatively unattractive component the preferable offer.

While much of the existing published research on bundled offers focuses on the assigning of discounts to individual products in the bundle, this study adds to the body of knowledge by showing that variation in perceived benefits is the key driver of different responses to a free-with-purchase offer versus a bundled offer.

To heighten shopper interest, fast moving consumer goods marketers often attach supplementary labels to the package front to promote product benefits. This study aims to use claim credibility as the foundation for investigating how an extra affixed label that addresses product benefits impacts consumer evaluation, as well as identifying important factors that might moderate the resulting responses.

Three between-subjects experiments examine how claim credibility mediates the influence of extra affixed labels on product evaluation (Study 1). They also test whether the impact on consumer responses of extra affixed labels, with emphasis on the same vs different benefits as those printed on the front of a package (Study 2.1) or with a high or low relevance between their claimed benefits and the front-of-package stated ingredients (Study 2.2), is dependent upon individuals’ need for cognition.

Results show the power of extra affixed labels in improving product evaluation. Claim credibility mediated the observed effects of extra affixed labeling. Yet, the favorable effects of extra affixed labels for individuals high in need for cognition is diminished when expressed in a different (vs same) claim from those printed on the package front or the claim about product benefits is low (vs high) relevance to the declared ingredients. The reverse holds true for those low in need for cognition.

This study advances knowledge on the effects of extra affixed label claims on product evaluation.

Expanding on the real-world financial market framework and considering the current market turmoil, with cryptocurrencies (where contracts for difference (CFDs) are extremely common) (Hasso et al., 2019) displaying unprecedented volatility, the authors aim to test in an online laboratory setting whether displaying a risk warning message is truly effective in reducing the level of risk taken and whether the placement of this method makes a difference.

To explore the impact of risk disclosure framing on risk-taking behavior, the authors conducted an online pair-wise lottery choice experiment. In addition to manipulating risk awareness through the presence or absence of risk warning messages of varying intensity, the authors also considered dynamic inconsistency, cognitive ability and questionnaire-based financial risk tolerance (FRT) scores. The authors aimed to identify potential relationships between these variables and experimentally elicited risk aversion. The authors' study offers valuable insights into the complex nature of risky decision-making and sheds light on the importance of considering dynamic inconsistency in addition to risk awareness and aversion.

The authors' results provide statistical evidence for the efficacy of informative and very salient messages in mitigating risky decision, hinting at several policy implications. The authors also provide some statistical evidence in support of the relationship between cognitive abilities and risk preferences. The authors detect that individual with low cognitive abilities scores display great risk aversion.

This study investigates the impact of risk warning messages on investment decisions in an online laboratory setting – a unique approach. However, the authors go beyond this and also examine the potential influence of dynamic inconsistency on decision-making, adding further value to the literature on this topic. To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the participants, the authors collect data on cognitive ability and FRT using questionnaires. This study provides a simple and cost-effective framework that can be easily replicated in future research – a valuable contribution to the field.