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This study aims to critically review recent contributions to the methodology of financial economics and discuss how they relate to one another and directions for further research.

A critical review of recent literature on new methodologies for financial economics.

Recent books have made important contributions to the study of financial economics. They suggest new approaches that include an emphasis on radical uncertainty, adaptive markets, agent-based modeling and narrative economics, as well as extensions of behavioral finance to include concepts such as diagnostic expectations. Many of these contributions can be seen more as complements than substitutes and provide fruitful directions for further research. Efficient markets can be seen as holding under particular circumstances. A major them of most of these contributions is that the study of financial crises and other aspects of financial economics requires the use of multiple theories and approaches. No one approach will be sufficient.

There are great opportunities for further research in financial economics making use of these new approaches.

These recent contributions can be quite useful for improved analysis by researchers, private participants in the financial sector and macroeconomic and regulatory officials.

Provides an introduction to these new approaches and highlights fruitful areas for their extensions and applications.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there are some specific practices that communications professionals should follow in creating influence in a world in which people increasingly get their news via Facebook and other social media.

The article examines how social media deliver news items to members to determine whether that process can be influenced by aspects of content design.

There appears to be evidence that adopting specific sharing strategies, focusing on visual design and constructing narratives that feed into people’s existing beliefs increases the likelihood that one’s content becomes influential.

While the evidence seems compelling that certain strategies do have an impact on degree of influence, there are few hard metrics to prove causation.

By adopting the strategies proposed in the article, communications professionals will have a set of guidelines for creating content that becomes influential in social media.

While the literature already contains studies on sharing strategies, this article is one of the first to consider the implications for advocacy of the fact that in social media, algorithms are responsible for selecting what people see in their news feeds.

The purpose of this paper is to disseminate street gang research by Hesketh (2018) that has identified a major aspect of young disenfranchised people’s attraction to street gangs as edgework risk-taking. The study which sought to identify differences between those who joined street gangs compared to those who abstained on Merseyside.

Two samples were taken from locations within the five boroughs of Merseyside, the first comprising of 22 participants (18–25) involved in street gangs as active and ex-members with a second sample consisting of 22 participants (18–25) who had completely abstained from street gang membership. Data were collected through adoption of biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) (Wengraf, 2001), with analysis taking the form of Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) version of grounded theory.

Of the many findings that surrounded what was identified as the core category/central phenomena of “coping with limited opportunity” it emerged that marginalisation and austerity were contributing to increasing inequality and institutional constraint on young people on Merseyside. As a result, many of the 18–25 year young men felt powerless, lacking identity and aspirational drive. Joining a gang thus became not only a way in which control was seized back from such constraint through criminal risk-taking behaviour, what Lyng (1990) has termed “edgework”, but also a means in which many of the young men interviewed gained an identity of being “bad” from which intrinsically pleasurable seductive and criminally erotic sensations were derived (Katz, 1988). Moreover, a relatively new version of edgework was also identified, even though by way of male testimony. Called “vicarious edgework”, the phenomena sees young women drawn to male gang members (“bad boys”) to derive the excitement of risk indirectly while remaining law abiding. In sum, the paper highlights a concerning socio-psychological and key motivating driver triggered by marginalisation.

Study samples were all male. Thus, any observations on the vicarious edgework aspect of risk taking requires further research involving both young men and women.

The paper highlights the need for more understanding of the allure of risk-taking. The paper identifies a new form of female edgework. The paper draws attention to gang membership and non-membership on Merseyside, an area that has been greatly neglected by gangs’ studies in the UK. The paper describes a novel way of data collection using an adoption of BNIM.

In sum, the paper highlights a concerning socio-psychological and key motivating driver triggered by marginalisation. This, the author contends has been largely neglected by risk factor focussed interventions that largely concentrate on the idea of rational choice theory and sociological positivism.

The paper attempts to disseminate original street gang research by Hesketh (2018) that has identified a major aspect of young disenfranchised people’s attraction to street gangs as edgework risk-taking.

This paper aims to provide instructions on how to implement an adapted version of the standard repertory grid technique (VARGT). The purpose of which is to provide practitioners with a tool, which enables active engagement by participants in research and clinical practice. This tool has been used effectively with people convicted of stalking offences.

Repertory grids, developed from Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory (1955), had never been used with those who stalk, either clinically or in a research context. Visual and kinaesthetic adaptations were made to standard RGT procedures (Grice, 2002; Tan and Hunter, 2002), for use in a mixed methods research study (Wheatley, 2019, p. 77) due to expected challenges in engaging with this group. This manuscript presents theoretical underpinnings and step-by-step instructions for practical application.

The VARGT is easy to administer and produces rich data, in both qualitative and quantitative formats. This adapted approach encourages active participation and an interpreted therapeutic collaboration (Wheatley et al., 2020).

This novel technique has engaged men convicted of stalking offences collaboratively in research activities and showed potential for its use as a clinical tool. This instructional technical paper allows the technique to be replicated.

This novel technique has engaged men convicted of stalking offences collaboratively in research activities and showed potential for its use as a clinical tool. This instructional technical paper allows the technique to be replicated.

Some virtual, immersive stories are filled with documents that users must locate and interact with to experience a narrative. Exploring a new area of inquiry in the information science field, this study focuses on individuals' experiences with documents in a particular 3D storytelling world.

Using a qualitative approach, this study examined user interactions with virtual documents to better understand the relationship between information behavior and narrative spaces. This study employed observations of users in a story-rich world, followed by semistructured interviews using virtual artifacts and stimulated recall.

Using an interpretative phenomenological analysis, this study found that (1) environmental and personal influences, (2) the search and the narrative experience and (3) expectation and confirmation events surround a user's experiences with documents in storytelling worlds. These influences and experiences determine the user's relationship with these documents, which may be considered narrative ephemera – objects that a user accumulates to create and structure a story. This model of narrative ephemera depicts the user's search for narrative cadence, fulfillment of competence needs and visions of story events or the user's own lived experiences. Individuals may experience these phenomena from a single document, shifting back and forth between the designers' intentions and the users' own realities.

This study represents a first attempt to investigate information behavior in a distributed narrative space: a virtual world filled with documents. This study reveals that commonly employed information behavior theories, as well as literary and motivation theories, may be well suited for investigating story worlds. Continued research in this area of inquiry may benefit educators as well as designers of digital stories.

The purpose of this study is to prove that narratives can be a adequate foundation for human behavior in general and economic behavior in particular using the Donald Duck universe as an example.

By using a content analysis, the authors examine 208 stories of the Donald Duck universe to prove that economic behavior is already embedded in modern narratives of the 20th century.

This analysis shows that behavioral finance effects are identified in a total of 52.4% of the analyzed comics. This study furthermore distinguishes the main comic characters Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck and finds that eight of the nine considered behavioral finance biases can be detected in both. The most striking effect for Donald Duck is overconfidence and for Uncle Scrooge loss aversion.

Collectively, these comics provide potential exemplars for behavioral finance. Regardless of whether these comics depict human nature or merely reflect human behavior during that time, they inevitably contribute to the understanding that psychological and sociological influences determine behavior in addition to economic factors that can be used for academic teaching.

In summary, comics, such as the Donald Duck universe, are suitable narratives for behavioral finance.

Surveyor variability has a significant impact on the accuracy and reliability of house condition surveys. Reports on one particular cognitive bias that surveyors may use when undertaking house condition surveys – the confirmation bias. Two experiments are conducted to investigate the confirmation bias. The experiments seem to indicate that the confirmation bias does have the potential to have an impact on condition survey decision making and therefore to contribute to surveyor variability. Methods of dealing with the bias are discussed; particularly the potential application of expert systems alongside hand‐held data‐capture devices.

The primary purpose of this paper is to review and critique Taleb's notion of black swan blindness for a subset of the broader field of financial economics – the search for capital adequacy rules for financial institutions who invest in residential mortgages. This search entails the analysis and prediction of extreme events in housing and mortgage markets.

The focus of this paper concerns efforts to assess the likelihood and consequences of extreme and consequential economic events prior to their occurrence. The goal is to assess the criticism offered by Taleb that economists overstate the understanding of extreme events. One piece of evidence consists of a case study of the literature and policies regarding capital adequacy for financial institutions who invest in residential mortgages. The other is a review of recent literature about the crisis that offers similar conclusions.

The evidence suggests that the criticism is valid. The case study reviews a number of areas in which the search for capital adequacy reflected the traits of black swan blindness as described by Taleb. The review of the recent literature about the crisis highlights a number of papers that reach similar conclusions. These include high level overviews of the literature on the crisis, e.g. Lo, a number of papers that specifically focus on housing and mortgage markets, and some very recent work about agent based modeling and complexity theory presented at the 2012 ARES meetings.

The conclusion suggests a number of ways in which economists can combat the potential of black swan blindness is our search for extreme events. One suggestion is to combat the error of confirmation with ongoing testing. Combating overly simplistic narratives can also be addressed by listening more carefully to the criticisms by people outside the field. Pay more attention to silent evidence by having more substantial and ongoing consumer testing of new products, more work to identify best practices, and more resources to enforce lending laws. Finally, more attention needs to be focused upon assumptions in the models that are based upon limited empirical evidence and, if found later to be false, may lead to dire outcomes.

These include more and ongoing evaluation of stress tests. New rules to adjust capital requirements over the business cycle are consistent with the suggestions of the paper. Economists need to spend more time exploring and learning from outliers in the models.

The recent crisis has been driven by a wide variety of factors from within many sectors and agents. The outcome has been a major problem for people in many sectors and regions of the economy. The hope is that economists can do a better job in the future to help policymakers and others be more prepared for the potential of extreme events in the hopes of avoiding them in the future or at least reducing their likelihood and damage caused by them.

The paper draws upon a wide variety of literature to establish its main points. Central to it is a review of an issue on which the author had substantial experience – academic and professional – and that also played a major role in the crisis – inadequate capital for an extreme downturn in house prices.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how young women and men perceive the Internet as a phenomenon and what role and meaning they ascribe to the Internet as an arena for defining themselves and for shaping their identity.

The empirical data consist of narratives written by Swedish adolescents. Using content analysis the analysis was carried out in three steps: (1) finding categories and themes, (2) calculation of statistical differences in category frequencies, (3) a theoretically informed interpretation of central themes, using Bourdieu’s concept of different forms of capital, and Giddens’ concept of “pure relations.”

The narratives exemplify how computer literacy and technological competence can be converted into social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Gender differences occur both in statistical differences between category frequencies in girls’ and boys’ narratives and in the interpretation of central themes. But there are also several examples that show more complex and contradictory tendencies, exceeding or transformative of gender differences and hierarchy.

This study considers adolescents’ own perspectives on an arena of great importance. The analyses have been performed both qualitatively and quantitatively, which gives a nuanced picture of young people’s self-defining experiences on the Internet.