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The purpose of this paper is to examine the behavior of decision makers in portfolio management meetings on innovation projects and to study decision‐making behavior at these meetings.

The paper is based on the case‐study approach; a theoretical framework is derived from sociology to direct the analysis of a portfolio management meeting. Four factors explain the behavior of decision making: the portfolio models as defined by organizational rules; issues related to the organizational context; a tendency to behave as others expect and to make appropriate decisions; and organizational learning processes.

The paper finds that the set of rules for conducting portfolio meetings was only partially followed. The identity of decision makers was not as calculating actors, but was shaped and influenced by four things: the formal system and rules, observations of others, the organizational context, and organizational learning. Systems other than the portfolio management systems compete for the decision makers' attention, as multiple criteria are manifest. Signals from top management influenced the decision makers' interpretations of the organizational context and framed the decision making. As learning showed decision makers what behavior was acceptable, this behavior seems to be further enforced. Decision making thus becomes more a matter of making appropriate decisions than of optimal or rational decision making.

The study is limited to a single case study in one organization. Replications among other samples are needed to validate current findings.

This paper presents a framework for understanding how portfolio decision making is shaped and molded through appropriate decision making rather than by following the normative calculative approach. In practice, the decision maker must deal with multiple factors and criteria that make it difficult to carry out a traditional rational decision‐making process. Still, the functions of decision making meetings can extend beyond decision‐making. They may also serve as social occasions and as occasions for interpreting possible actions and sharing that information, making it possible to make appropriate decisions. Decisions are thus a construct rather than a calculative outcome.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether heuristic and herding biases influence portfolio construction and performance in Greece. The current research determines the situation among investors in Greece, a country with several economic problems for the last decade.

A survey has been conducted covering a group of active private investors. The relationship between private investors' behavior and portfolio construction and performance was tested using a multiple regression.

The authors find that heuristic variable affects private investor's portfolio construction and performance satisfaction level positively. A robustness test on a second group, consisting of professional investors, reveals that heuristic and herding biases affect investment behavior when constructing a portfolio.

The authors recommend investors to select professional's investment portfolio tools in constructing investment portfolios and avoid excessive errors, which occur due to heuristic. The awareness and understanding of heuristic and herding could be helpful for professionals and decision-makers in financial institutions by improving their performance resulting in more efficient markets.

The main contribution of this paper lies in the fact that it is the first study on two major behavioral dimensions that affect the investor's portfolio construction and performance in Greece. The rationale of the current research is that the results are helpful for investors in order to take rational, reliable and profitable decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to improve decision quality, and therefore project and portfolio success, by testing the influence of different visual representations of interdependency data in a simulated decision experiment. A network mapping approach to visualize project interdependencies is introduced and compared with matrix and tabular displays.

A simulated decision task in a controlled classroom setting tested five hypotheses though a sample of 480 experiments.

The type of data representation used is associated with differing levels of decision quality, and the use of network mapping displays is aligned with the best results.

The findings are limited as this experiment-based study presented a simplified decision scenario and involved students rather than practicing managers. The findings are best interpreted in combination with organization-based research.

The findings of this study suggest that visual data displays, particularly network mapping displays, can provide benefits and improve project portfolio decision quality. Managers may draw upon this study to design ways to include visual data representations in their project portfolio management decision processes.

This study uses experimentation to complement organization-based studies to better understand the influence of different methods of visualizing data and managing interdependencies between projects. This research provides an important contribution to meet the acknowledged need for better tools to understand and manage project interdependencies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships among perception of past portfolio returns, optimism and financial decisions.

The relationships are examined using a data set of both retail and institutional investors in Malaysia and estimated using ordinary least square regression.

The results demonstrate that perception of past portfolio returns influences both retail and institutional investors’ trading and risk taking. Optimism measured as relative investment optimism and personal investment optimism similarly influences both groups of investors’ financial decisions. However, perception of past portfolio returns causes only retail investors to exhibit optimism. The results furthermore show that only for retail investors perception of past portfolio returns indirectly influences financial decisions, through the mediating channel of optimism.

The findings on the influences of perception of past portfolio returns and the mediating channel in decision process help to understand the differences between retail and institutional investors. Retail investors are found to be more susceptible to optimism. Therefore, regulators in Malaysia may enhance their initiatives by incorporating the peril of forming optimistic expectations in financial decisions, by giving special focus on retail investors.

This paper focuses on investors’ perception of past portfolio returns and its influence on various financial decisions, unlike past portfolio returns or market returns. Also, this paper is among the first to demonstrate the mediating channel of optimism in investors’ decision process.

The objective of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to explore the current state of research in the field of household finance (HF). This study aims to summarize the existing research to highlight the importance of household finance in a nation’s economy. By exploring all conceptual and applied implications of HF, this study projects directions for future research to develop a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

This SLR is based on 112 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 2006 and 2020 (Table 3). The methodology comprises five steps, namely, formulation of research questions, identification of studies, their selection and evaluation, analyses and syntheses and presentation of results.

The findings of this study show that studies on HF are gradually increasing worldwide with the USA registering the highest number of published research on the topic during the period under scrutiny. Notwithstanding the increasing attention and research on HF, empirical research in emerging economies is lagging. Additionally, this study finds that HF structure presents a perfect setting to understand how households compose their financial portfolio, make financial decisions and what factors influence their decisions.

This study is an SLR – an accurate and accepted method of reviewing available literature on a selected subject. However, the selection of inclusion and exclusion criteria depends on the researchers’ rationale which might lead to research bias. This should be considered an inherent limitation of SLR.

By synthesizing the contents of extant literature, this study presents important insights into HF. This study underlines the most discussed topics in the domain and identifies potential investigation areas. This study gives the knowledge of leading articles, authors and journals and informs scholars and academicians about the areas that need further investigation by portraying the complete picture of the subject in a systematic manner. Further, this study highlights that households make suboptimal financial decisions that affect their financial well-being. To reduce the adverse impacts of these decisions, policymakers and financial institutions must take steps to improve households’ use of formal financial markets. Household decisions can be reformed by enhancing consumers’ knowledge about financial products and services. Furthermore, households can be served better by offering customization in traditional financial products.

This study synthesizes the main findings of selected literature on HF. The expansion of studies on HF has generated the need to review the existing literature in a systematic manner. To the researchers’ best knowledge, this SLR is the first thorough study of available articles in the HF domain. This study presents the scope of future research by highlighting numerous aspects and functions of HF.

This chapter presents the survey of selected linear and mixed integer programming multi-objective portfolio optimization. The definitions of selected percentile risk measures are presented. Some contrasts and similarities of the different types of portfolio formulations are drawn out. The survey of multi-criteria methods devoted to portfolio optimization such as weighting approach, lexicographic approach, and reference point method is also presented. This survey presents the nature of the multi-objective portfolio problems focuses on a compromise between the construction of objectives, constraints, and decision variables in a portfolio and the problem complexity of the implemented mathematical models. There is always a trade-off between computational time and the size of an input data, as well as the type of mathematical programming formulation with linear and/or mixed integer variables.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a controlled experiment to examine the effect of goal setting and affect framed feedback on repeated asset allocation investment decisions.

The design of the experiment is a 2×2 between subject design. Subjects allocated monies among four investments for 20 periods. One manipulation varied whether subjects received performance feedback in the form of a happy or sad face, while another manipulation varied whether subjects set a financial goal for themselves and received goal attainment performance feedback.

The main findings include: subjects initially allocate assets in a manner roughly consistent with their stated preference for risk; prior year asset performance leads subjects to make significant changes in portfolio asset allocation in a manner consistent with beliefs of positive autocorrelation in asset returns; and the addition of happy or sad faces to performance feedback information leads to even greater changes in asset allocation.

Using ideas from the theory on the self‐regulation of behavior and the role of affect in decision making, the authors develop an original framework to account for the results.

This study aims to develop a new integrated decision-making framework specifically designed to address complexity and uncertainty for project portfolio management. It particularly focuses on managing portfolios in a post-merger context. The paper portrays a normative and prescriptive approach to effectively creating a well-balanced project portfolio in a post-merger scenario.

This study introduces hyper-project portfolio frame as a prospective methodology for evaluating post-merger portfolios. The proposed method especially addresses the challenges associated with integration following a merger.

Hyper-project portfolio frame provides fundamental leaps in post-merger project portfolios. The frame gives opportunities to check consistency with policy, organizational scalability, flexibility and product diversity. It also underpins achieving the strategic objectives of mergers and acquisitions (M&As).

The literature synthesis is approached from an interpretative standpoint. The research incorporates discussions and comparative studies from the relevant literature and introduces a novel approach. Additionally, new descriptive studies can expand the proposed process-oriented decision-making. Moreover, this research does not consider hostile takeovers.

Nested in content and process-oriented fashion, the frame provides suitable prequalification analysis for portfolios in a post-merger under the concepts of complexity, uncertainty, risk and value.

Managers' attention is a scarce resource in complex innovation settings. Prior research on the factors to which managers pay attention is mostly based on surveys. The present study aims to address the need for knowledge about the behavior of decision makers based on observations from portfolio meetings. The study seeks to investigate how managers allocate their attention and the role of different factors for their attention. Observations also make it possible to compare prior research and expectations with the actual observed behavior of decision makers.

The present analysis draws on insights from previous research into decision making in product and portfolio management and studies on organizational decision making. The authors frame why the attention of decision makers is so critical in complex situations. Data for this study were collected through direct observation, from a portfolio management system, and from an information quality measurement system in an internationally operating petrochemical company. Observations were transcribed, coded and analyzed with regression analysis using the Proc Lifereg procedure in SAS.

Six potential factors that might explain decision makers' attention are identified. The analysis shows that the quality of information was not significant for explaining variations of decision makers' attention; but, even more surprisingly, differences in project status did not explain variations in attention. Delayed projects did not get significantly more attention than those delivered on time. By controlling for other project characteristics, the newness of projects to the corporate portfolio was found to be the most important parameter.

First, the analysis is based on observations from actual meetings rather than from surveys. Second, several observations contradict prior research on product development, e.g. it has been argued that decision makers should pay special attention to certain phases and projects having trouble meeting expectations towards planned deadlines. It is also new that findings on the different treatment of new projects and ongoing projects have been brought forward in research on product and portfolio management.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the interactions between accounting and marketing activities in a Taiwanese telecommunication firm by demonstrating the dramatic impact that improved costing methods had on the firm’s customer portfolio management activities and consequently on the firm’s bottom line.

The paper presents a case study of a firm in the highly competitive telecommunications industry in Taiwan. The case study was constructed by interviewing key individuals within the organization over an extended period and supplementing those reports with an analysis of internal company documents.

The firm dramatically increased profitability through the integration of activity-based costing into their customer portfolio framework requiring marketing and accounting functions to work closely together. In this rapidly evolving market, cost allocation and customer portfolio management are indispensable. Identifying accurate costs and keeping key customers is a critical issue for the case company. While theoretically the approach is simple, in practice considerable hurdles needed to be overcome.

While considerable literature suggests that customer profitability drives the management of an organization’s customer portfolio, critical to the success of such an endeavor is the accurate calculation and allocation of costs to individual customers. As an interdisciplinary study, this paper provides insights for both accounting and marketing highlighting their reliance on each other in a sound firm. The results of this paper will serve as a supplement to past customer portfolio management research as well as a reference for any firm seeking to enhance their approach to portfolio management.