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The purpose of this paper is to analyze recent findings in the research on bankers' lending decision making, to merge relevant findings in psychology and economics and create a comprehensive review of the literature.

The authors used a systematic article search for empirical studies when conducting the research.

The findings are analyzed on the basis of human decision‐making research. The results of the review are three conclusions about loan officers' decision making: their dependency on bank characteristics, their decision‐making biases, and their deliberate and intuitive reasoning approaches.

The paper's findings are important, both as a summary of the literature on lending decision making and also as a foundation for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to compare two conflicting theoretical frameworks that predict or explain police decision making. Klinger's ecological theory proposes that an increased level of serious crimes in an area decreases the likelihood an officer will deal with order‐maintenance issues, while Fagan and Davies suggest an increase in low‐level disorder will increase order maintenance behavior of police officers.

Using a vignette research design, the authors examines factors that may contribute to police officers’ decision to make a traffic stop in four jurisdictions with varying levels of serious crime. Ordered logistic regression with robust standard errors was used in the analysis.

Analysis of the findings demonstrates that officers who work in higher crime areas are less likely to stop a vehicle, as described in the vignettes. Additional predictors of police decision to stop include vehicles driven by teenaged drivers and drivers who were speeding in a vehicle.

The current research is limited to an adequate but fairly small sample size (n=204), and research design that examines hypothetical scenarios of police decision making. Further data collection across different agencies with more officers and more variation in crime levels is necessary to extend the current findings.

This paper adds to the literature in two primary ways. First, it compares two competing theoretical claims to examine a highly discretionary form of police behavior and second, it uniquely uses a vignette research design to tap into an area of police behavior that is difficult to study (e.g. the decision not to stop).

The purpose of this paper is to apply focal concerns theory as a theoretical explanation for police officer decision making during a traffic stop that results in a consent search. The study uses coefficients testing to better examine the issue of racial profiling through the use of a race-specific model.

The data for this study come from traffic stops conducted by the Louisville Police Department between January 1 and December 31, 2002.

The results show that the three components of focal concerns theory can explain police officer decision making for consent searches. Yet, the components of focal concerns theory play a greater role in stops of Caucasian male drivers.

The data for this study are cross-sectional and self-reported from police officers.

This paper shows the utility of applying focal concerns theory as a theoretical explanation for police officer decision making on consent searches and how the effects of focal concerns vary depending on driver race.

The findings based on focal concerns theory can provide an opportunity for police officers or departments to explain what factors impact the decision making during consent searches.

This is the first study (to the researchers’ knowledge) that examines the racial effects of focal concerns on traffic stop consent searchers using coefficients testing.

This study aims to provide evidence of how budget officers use non-financial and accrual-based cost information in the budgeting process and how the usage of this information is influenced by financial constraints.

A randomized survey-based field experiment investigating budget officers in 546 Japanese local governments (LGs) was conducted. This allowed us to identify the budget officers' decision-making in the public sector budgeting process by creating and analyzing primary data with regression models.

We found that budget officers suppress budget amounts based on non-financial information of good performances. Under fiscal constraints, officers further reduce budget amounts using information on high accrual-based costs and poor non-financial performance.

Our survey-based field experiment allowed us to obtain primary data from officers making budget decisions. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence that non-financial good and poor performance information and accrual-based cost information affect budget officers' decision-making under financial constrain.

This paper aims to examine the influence Jones’ Moral Intensity Model (1991) has on the decision-making process of anti-money laundering (AML) compliance officers charged with reporting suspicious money laundering transactions in Jersey.

Ten interviews were conducted to elicit participants’ views on the six dimensions of moral intensity and their influence on the compliance officers’ decision to submit a suspicious activity report (SAR) of potential money laundering.

The findings indicate that the officers’ moral intensity to submit a SAR seems to be heavily influenced by issue-specific contextual factors. Contexts (legal and legislative mandates) seem to have more of an effect on the moral intent and actions of the officers rather than directly affecting the decision to submit a report of a suspicious money laundering transaction.

The paper lays the groundwork for further work in this area and calls on researchers to develop instruments that can enhance the measurements of the dimensions of moral intensity.

The setting (AML in the financial sector) is both timely and extremely interesting to keep studying, particularly in Jersey because of its dubious sensitive particularities.

The study is the first to examine Jersey AML sector through the lens of moral intensity. In this sense, the paper poses interesting questions, namely, to explore the dynamic complexities experienced by compliance officers in Jersey to detect and report suspicious money laundering activities and the decision-making criteria of actually submitting a SAR.

This article explores officer use of suspicion before informal police-citizen encounters as a method to further understand police officer decision-making. There is a body of research focused on officer decision-making before formal “stop and search” encounters, yet, while the more informal “stop and chat” encounters are ubiquitous, they are a comparatively under-researched part of policework.

The research takes an ethnographic approach to explore police decision-making. It used participant observation (800 h over 93 patrol shifts) of front-line first response officers from New Zealand (n = 45) and South Australia (n = 48). Field observations were complemented with informal discussion in the field and 27 semi-structured interviews.

It reveals that officers applied three situational “tests” to assess the circumstances or actions observed before initiating an informal encounter. Officers then weighed up whether the circumstances were harmful, contrary to law, or socially acceptable to determine the necessity of initiating a police-citizen encounter. This process is conceived as suspicioning: deciding whether circumstances appear prima facie suspicious, how an officer goes about collecting more information to corroborate suspicion to ultimately inform a course of action.

The findings present a new perspective to understanding how and why police officers decide to initiate encounters with members of the public. Moreover, as the first ethnographic cross-national research of officers from New Zealand and South Australia, it provides a rare comparative glimpse of Antipodean policing.

The aim of this study is to identify the dimensions used by police officers in Scotland to discriminate and categorise operational situations.

This article was based on two studies: study 1 was a card‐sorting task: 23 officers categorised a set of 19 typical police operational situations, analysed using multi‐dimensional scaling; study 2 was a judgement task: 112 police officers rated 20 situations (19 from study1) in terms of amount of time to make a decision, risk to self, risk to others, familiarity and stress. Frequency data and correlations were calculated.

Study 1 results showed that the two main dimensions used to discriminate between situations were “familiarity” and “risk to the officer”. Study 2 found that most situations required a decision in less than three minutes. Rank and experience were related to familiarity but not to the other judgements. The situations requiring the fastest decisions were also judged to be of higher risk and more unfamiliar. Risks to self and to others were highly correlated, and higher risk situations were judged as more stressful.

This preliminary study shows that knowledge elicitation techniques can be used to improve our understanding of police officers' knowledge and cognitive skills for operational policing.

Good situational judgements form the basis of effective operational decision‐making. Understanding how officers “read” situations and how this develops with expertise can provide valuable information for police training and critical incident management.

Police officers' cognitive skills have rarely been studied in relation to routine operational policing. This study is a first attempt to examine situational judgement skills.

The purpose of this paper is to broaden understanding as to how certain social/personal dynamics influence credit decisions in Sri Lanka, elucidating them through a taxonomy and a conceptual typological matrix.

This research is an exploratory case study. The primary data collection methods are interviews and reconstruction of experiences. The data are complemented by documentary analysis and post-research events.

The research findings propose that credit officers and customers are influenced by six dynamics under three dimensions: the evaluation procedures (systematic/formal or heuristics); the relationship between customers and bank officers (personal or role relationship); and justification of credit (rational or irrational/situational). Based on the above results, a taxonomy of influential tactics and personality traits and a typological matrix are developed to classify credit decision-makers, who are labelled as BOSS, ROBOT, REBEL and BUDDY.

These case studies are from a private bank in Sri Lanka, hence it could affect the generalization of findings. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to investigate the plausibility of the findings in diverse cultural backgrounds.

Credit decision-makers and credit applicants could make use of these typological matrix and the taxonomy to understand each other and employ more influential approaches and appropriate influential techniques to make effective credit decisions. It also provides more insight into understanding the nature of credit-decisions and decision-makers and, provokes further research.

To the author’s best knowledge, this is the first study in Sri Lanka that considers certain influencing factors of credit decision-making and proposes a conceptual typology to understand those factors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of racial profiling when the traffic stop outcome is a search using focal concerns theory as a theoretical explanation for police officer decision making and propensity score matching (PSM) as a better analysis to understand the race of the driver.

The data for this study come from traffic stops conducted by the Louisville Police Department between January 1 and December 31, 2002.

The results show that the elements of focal concerns theory matter most when it comes to if a traffic stop that resulted in a search even though racial profiling was evident. The use of PSM provides evidence that it is a better statistical technique when studying racial profiling. The gender of the driver was significant for male drivers but not for female drivers.

The data for this study are cross-sectional and are self-report data from the police officer.

This paper serves as a theoretical explanation that other researchers could use when studying racial profiling along with a better type of statistical analysis being PSM.

The findings based on focal concerns theory could provide an explanation for police officer decision making that police departments could use to help citizens understand why a traffic stop search took place.

This is the first study of its kind to the researcher’s knowledge to apply focal concerns theory with PSM to understand traffic stop searches.

The call to defund the police emerges globally from the voices of those who stand up to police brutality. Reallocating funds so that non-criminalising entities can meet community needs is crucial, but it does not address the problem in the system of policing. Further, the call for accountability cannot just emerge after a police-related death but must extend to the process of police work, beginning with police academy training. The author can identify and solve the most pressing issues by examining officer training as it is foundational to departmental work culture, organisational structure, and daily decision-making. Based on participant observation of academy lectures, scenario training, and informal conversations at two police academies in the Midwestern part of the United States, the author uncovers daily processes in which new recruits are socialised into their role as officers. Data reveal officers are taught a racialised decision-making logic that prioritises arrest, and perpetuates harm against its citizens. Training also devalues formal education, undermining knowledge that can expand officer thinking and critical self-reflection. Adhering to the goals of activist criminology, this chapter illuminates deeply rooted patterns of oppression and suggests reform aligned with critical social justice and anti-racist principles.