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This study aims to examine how a firm’s strategic emphasis on value appropriation over value creation is associated with the readability of narrative disclosures in annual reports.

This study examines the effect of the strategic emphasis on annual report readability based on a total of 45,273 US firm-year (5,754 unique firms) observations for the period from 1994 to 2018. Strategic emphasis is measured as advertising expenses minus research and development expenses, scaled by sales and Bog index and various measures, such as the FOG, KINCAID and FLESCH index, are used to measure the annual report readability.

The authors find that the strategic emphasis on value appropriation over value creation is positively related to firms’ annual report readability. In addition, the positive effect of the strategic emphasis on value appropriation over value creation on annual report readability is more pronounced with high managerial ability.

With the continual effort of Securities and Exchange Commission regulation and IFRS updates to improve narrative disclosures, it is meaningful to provide evidence showing how managers shape narratives in annual reports by highlighting good news with easy-to-understand words, but also may establish a barrier to understanding by choosing to use long and complex words depending on their strategic emphasis.

The evidence suggests that a strategic emphasis between value appropriation and value creation and managerial ability is an important factor in shaping the readability of annual reports, which contributes to the management, accounting and finance literature that investigates the relationship between resource deployment (i.e. strategic emphasis) and textual properties of corporate financial disclosures (i.e. readability).

The authors examine how a firm's strategic emphasis (SE) on value appropriation (VA) over value creation (VC) is associated with accounting conservatism.

To examine the effect of SE on a firm's adoption of conservative accounting practice, the authors measure SE as advertising expenses minus research and development (R&D) expenses scaled by total assets. The authors rely on the asymmetric timeliness of earnings from Basu (1997) to measure conditional conservatism and investigate how the incremental sensitivity of earnings to negative stock returns varies with the SE.

SE on VA over VC is found to be positively related to accounting conservatism since they want to deter entrants (i.e. competition adjustment) and to accommodate the tighter monitoring over the financial reporting system from stakeholders (i.e. risk adjustment). This argument is also supported by the additional cross-sectional tests based on the different level of market competition and external monitoring environment. In addition, the positive association between SE on VA over VC and accounting conservatism is less pronounced when managerial overconfidence is high.

Implication is that two important decisions (i.e. SE and accounting conservatism) are related with each other since both are to create competitive advantage and to maintain financial stability for a firm, and the relation differs by managerial characteristics.

This study highlights the differential roles of SE in shaping the conservatism in financial reporting and the importance of overconfidence in driving conservative accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to answer why the predominant competitive reaction (CR) is non-reactive one in the previous literature by showing that some fluctuations of CR may average out to zero.

This research proposes a model for measuring CR volatility to examine whether a firm’s CR differs over time. A rolling-windows time series approach is applied to three different data sets.

The results show that firms indeed react to each other, but the types of reactions vary over time, thereby creating a misunderstood “no-reaction” in the literature.

This study may help understand the gap between academic findings (i.e. no-reaction) and managerial reality (i.e. marketing wars).

Although a firm’s CR should be understood as a series of managerial actions that may change over time, the extant literature has not considered this temporal variation of CR. This paper provides a systematic review of the empirically based literature and provides insights into the importance of strategic variation in competitive dynamics.

The purpose of this paper is to provide some insights on current industry internship practices and the perceptions of students during their internship experience. This paper also highlights some issues pertaining to internship from the students’ and the industry’s perspective

The paper utilises qualitative research methodology using in-depth interviews.

The sources of conflict arising between the two parties need to be addressed carefully so as to create a win–win situation. The paper offers some suggestions for higher education institutions as to how to establish better guidelines for student internships as well as for industry operators..

Internship, industrial training, practical training or work-integrated learning refers to the involvement of students, institutions and colleges of higher learning in the industry. Internship provides an opportunity for students to experience first-hand, a work-related learning process. Given this, the involvement of industry in accepting students onto well-designed internship programmes is very much needed, so as to ensure the completion of a balanced period of study for a career in hospitality and tourism.

Blagden Packaging unveiled at this year's Pakex Exhibition a new concept in “bag‐in‐the‐box” Intermediate Bulk Container. The multi‐national project between LB Systemer SA Copenhagen, Dow Corning and Blagden Packaging is the result of over two years research and development.

This study investigates the determinants of effective human and artificial intelligence (AI) relationship-building strategies for brands. It explores the antecedents and consequences of consumers' interactant satisfaction with communication and identifies ways to enhance consumer purchase intention via AI chatbot promotion.

Microsoft Xiaoice served as the focal AI chatbot, and 331 valid samples were obtained. A two-stage structural equation modeling-artificial neural network approach was adopted to verify the proposed theoretical model.

Regarding the IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient) of AI chatbots, the multi-dimensional social support model helps explain consumers' interactant satisfaction with communication, which facilitates affective attachment and purchase intention. The results also show that chatbots should emphasize emotional and esteem social support more than informational support.

Brands should focus more on AI chatbots' emotional and empathetic responses than functional aspects when designing dialogue content for human–AI interactions. Well-designed AI chatbots can help marketers develop effective brand promotion strategies.

This research enriches the human–AI interaction literature by adopting a multi-dimensional social support theoretical lens that can enhance the interactant satisfaction with communication, affective attachment and purchase intention of AI chatbot users.

Marketing flounders at many companies today, as people have become relatively immune to messages broadcast at them. The way to reach customers is to create an experience they can participate in and enjoy, the new offering frontier. To be clear, this article is not about “experiential marketing” – that is, giving marketing promotions more sensory appeal by adding imagery, tactile materials, motion, scents, sounds, or other sensations. Rather, as a key part of their marketing programs companies should create experience places – absorbing, entertaining real or virtual locations – where customers can try out offerings as they immerse themselves in the experience. Companies should not stop at creating just one experience place; marketers should investigate the location hierarchy model to learn how to design a series of related experiences that flow one from another, creating demand up and down at every level. These various real and virtual experiences generate new forms of revenue and drive sales of whatever the company currently offers. When experience places are done well, potential customers can’t help but pay attention – and the leading companies find that customers are willing to pay for the experiences.

E-government is new to the public administration sector of Abu Dhabi and it is rapidly expanding. The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that might motivate citizens to adopt the e-government public services provided by the Government of Abu Dhabi Emirate. The insights of the study will help government leaders to plan the delivery of public services effectively.

The study surveyed 638 United Arab Emirates (UAE) citizens living in three main districts of the Abu Dhabi Emirate. The research used an exploratory factor analysis that conforms the validity of the theoretical model to the data collected, confirmatory analysis to extract the latent factors and both multiple regression and structural equation modelling to test the research hypotheses.

The finding revealed that internet trust and performance expectancy was the strongest predictors of intention to use e-government services. Effort expectancy, facilitating conditions and trust had a positive influence on behavioural intention (BI). However, social influence (SI) did not have a significant effect. Gender, age and experience did not affect the relationship between SI and BI. It was also found that BI to use e-government services had a significant influence on the actual use of e-government sites.

When the government gets to know the major factors that affect the adoption of e-government services in Abu Dhabi, it can maximise its returns on ICT infrastructure investments by providing efficient service that could be adopted by the citizens.

The research has theoretical and practical value. Though the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model has previously been used in organisational settings, the present study uses a modified version in the context of citizens’ acceptance and use of e-government services. The present study thus provides an extension of the UTAUT model that could be suitable for developing countries such as the UAE.

It's been three years since my previous survey in RSR. Superb reference books in pop music have been appearing so frequently that I've been having trouble keeping up. Let's hope “next year's” survey will only be 12 months in the making and not 36.