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This study aims to examine how characteristics of an online review and a consumer reading the review influence the probability that the consumer will assess the review as authentic (real) or inauthentic (fake). This study further examines the specific factors that increase or decrease a consumer’s ability to detect a review’s authenticity and reasons a consumer makes these authenticity assessments.

Hypothesized relationships were tested using an online experiment of over 400 respondents who collectively provided 3,224 authenticity assessments along with 3,181 written self-report reasons for assessing a review as authentic or inauthentic.

The findings indicate that specific combinations of factors including review valence, length, readability, type of content and consumer personality traits and demographics lead to systematic bias in assessing review authenticity. Using qualitative analysis, this paper provided further insight into why consumers are deceived.

This research showed there are important differences in the way the authenticity assessment process works for positive versus negative reviews and identified factors that can make a fake review hard to spot or a real review hard to believe.

This research has implications for both consumers and businesses by emphasizing areas of vulnerability for fake information and providing guidance for how to design review systems for improved veracity.

This research is one of the few works that explicates how people assess information authenticity and their consequent assessment accuracy in the context of online reviews.

Government fiscal officers, practitioners and policy makers constantly deal with uncertainties in revenue and expenditure projections. These uncertainties create difficulties in resource allocation decisions when significant deviations occur. Clearly, certain variables account for these uncertainties and knowing them prior to revenue and expenditure planning may minimize potentials for errors. This study seeks to determine the identities and reliability of these variables through the application of a measurement model to aggregate data under the formulation that certain variables create uncertainties and affect significantly both revenues and expenditures of state and local governments. The results reveal that inflation, population, unemployment rate, time, government bond rate, and real long-term debts per capita are the most reliable indicators of both revenues and expenditures.

The purpose of this paper was to present a number of issues regarding broadband access strategies in the coming years with at least four different competing broadband access forms. Pricing, investment and financing in relation to these issues are presented. The developments of interconnection and Internet governance are also presented.

Description of trends for demand and supply for broadband access and the challenges for financing of the necessary investments.

The most probable outcome for the coming decade is that a broadband access strategy is very dependent on where you believe the saturation level for the demand of bandwidth from normal residential household will be. Wireline and mobile wireless solutions will probably mainly be complements. Furthermore, there is a challenge for the whole telecommunication sector in relation to financing the necessary investments, because several factors are forcing the profit level in the sector downwards. The ongoing merger of two different interconnection regimes has an impact on the economy for network operators. Finally, the challenge of how to govern the Internet is emphasized.

The paper provides a new structure for how to analyse the challenges for the telecom operators regarding choice of access strategy, financing of investments and governance.

We advance theory of how founder identity affects business model (BM) design during new venture creation and contribute to the cognitive perspective on BMs. We look at BM design as a longitudinal process involving a variety of cognitive work that is co-shaped by the founder identity work. Based on an in-depth nine-year process study of a single venture managed by three founders, we observed that a novelty-centered BM design resulted from cognitive work co-shaped by founder identity construction and verification processes. Yet, more remarkably, we noted that founder identity verification decreased over time and observed a process that we labeled “identity-business model decoupling.” It meant that the founders did not alter their founder identity but, over time, attentively grew self-aware and mindfully disengaged negative identity effects to design an effective BM. Our results provide a dynamic view on founder identity imprinting on ventures’ BMs and contribute to the identity, BM, and entrepreneurship literatures.

From an online survey of 114 participating accountants at staff, senior staff, and supervisor levels from a top-100 U.S. accounting firm, we investigate the effects of the Big Five personality traits (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness) on the ethical decision-making process of accountants. Within the framework of Rest’s (1986) Four-Component Model of Ethical Behavior, we focus on Component III, the formation of an intention to act upon one’s best ethical judgment. Based on the limited extant literature on the connection between personality and ethical behavior, we expect that accountants high in Conscientiousness and Openness will tend to form an intention to act ethically despite pressure in an ethical dilemma. We develop more tentative hypotheses about the remaining three factors. Controlling for age, gender, education, sole earning status, and experience, we find clear positive statistical effects of only Conscientiousness and Openness. These findings have implications for the human resource departments of accounting firms, as well as contributing to a basic understanding of the relationships between Big Five personality factors and ethical intention.

The complexities of environmental issues require that when developing new green products marketers have to seek‐out, involve and learn from stakeholders with environmental expertise. These stakeholders have information that lies outside the organisation’s main area of expertise and can assist the firm in developing less environmentally harmful products. This article examines US and Australian markets’ perceptions of stake‐holders’ potential to influence the green new product development (NPD) process and what strategies can be used to involve stakeholders in this process. The findings suggest that marketers believe some stakeholders with “high” influencing abilities should be involved in the green NPD process, although it appears that in practice, firms use very basic methods to include these stakeholders. It also appears that there is limited formal interaction between the firm and its stakeholders and that respondents are not engaging and learning from others with green product expertise.

This paper aims to underscore how the digitization of content and the convergence in the telecommunications sector has prompted a wave of consolidation between telecom and content players.

Using interdisciplinary insights from competition policy and business strategy, the paper draws attention to the interplay between business model innovation and merger control in the converged telecoms sector.

Technological innovation and business model innovation led to the emergence of over-the-top (OTT) services. This innovation in turn led to two key effects, first, successful commercialization of content and the emergence of the “smart pipes” that in turn has led to the second effect, which is increased mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the converged telecommunications sector. Emergence of OTT with big data as a key advantage challenged the strategy and business models of the more established players, such as the AT&T, Time Warner, Liberty Global and Fox, which in turn led to the current trend of M&As in the sector.

This paper makes the following key contributions to the literature on M&As between the fixed/mobile and content players. First, it elucidates how the existing market players can benefit from competition policy, such as merger remedies to enter new and related markets. Second, it advocates that the US and the European competition authorities while assessing these M&As, take due account of innovation in business models, as business model innovation not only promotes innovation in the market but also enhances consumer welfare, considering that it offers the merged firm economies of scale and scope to offer better-quality goods and services at subsidized prices.

The debate concerning the religious use of psychoactive substances may seem an unlikely candidate for revival in the current prohibitionist climate. Drug consumption is far more likely to incite public concern over the harmful and habit forming properties of certain substances, than conjure up an enthusiasm born of the 1960s for their potential to produce a sincere mystical experience. However, the recent emergence of religious movements who consume plant hallucinogens as their sacrament, and the growth of drug tourism for the spiritually inclined, reflects a renaissance in the use of psychoactive plants and chemicals for spiritual inspiration. This trend presents a challenge to the way in which certain drugs are culturally and legally defined, and brings the concept of religious freedom into the sphere of drug policy.