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Tests of assumed mediation models are common in research in many disciplines, including managerial psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and organizational theory. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to detail experimental design options for conducting such tests in a manner that has the potential to yield results that have high levels of internal and construct validity.

The paper presents a logical analysis of strategies for testing mediation models so as to insure valid inferences about causal relations between variables.

The most appropriate strategy for testing assumed mediation models is research that uses randomized experimental designs.

Managers should base their actions on valid evidence about phenomena. More specifically, managerial actions should be predicated on research results that have high levels of internal, construct, and statistical conclusion validity. Thus, this paper encourages managers to base decisions about organizational policies and practices on well‐designed experimental research.

This paper addresses a number of points about issues involving internal and construct validity in tests of assumed causal models that have not been covered in previous work.

Knowledge sharing, as a kind of social behavior that incorporates collective intelligence to achieve a certain goal, has become a remarkable developing trend in recent years. Under the context of traditional teaching, this study aims to explore the manner in which students become effective in sharing knowledge to help optimize course design and improve our existing education.

Among 195 university students taking an elective, the effects of different incentives on group performance in completing tasks is explored on the basis of a randomized experiment.

Results show that intra-group cooperation can be helpful to student performance, whereas intra-group competition neither improves nor worsens student performance. The former is mainly driven by reciprocity, especially for that stimulated by inter-group competition, whereas the latter is stimulated by egoism. Thus, proper reciprocity can promote student behavior to increase voluntary contribution. In addition, intra-group differences do not interfere with group performance, especially task-oriented groups.

Certain suggestions are proposed to improve the curriculum design in large classrooms. Forming groups is the best way to strengthen student knowledge sharing. Within task-oriented groups, the incentives of inter-group competition can encourage students to deepen intra-group cooperation and thus effectively improve group performance under the conditions of external competition.

This paper details an experimental study (n=197) that explores how different types of managerial change justifications affect employees’ reactions. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of managerial justification of a controversial decision in referential terms, ideological terms or a combination of the two.

A randomized controlled experiment was used applying case-based video clips to ensure vividness and realism in the experimental manipulation.

The results show that referential justification caused a drop in the perceived trustworthiness of management, such that it reduced employees’ perceptions of the manager’s integrity. The effect was most pronounced in participants having elevated levels of dispositional resistance to change. The drop in perceived integrity was indirectly associated with reduced intention to support the change together with adverse affective and cognitive reactions to change.

A robust test of different change justifications in a randomized, controlled setting, which also highlights the psychological mechanisms through which referential change justifications reduce follower trust. This result should help managers more readily understand the components of successful communication in organizational change.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of monitoring local authorities on the quality of governance and public services reported by citizens in Vietnam, using the Vietnam Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) surveys.

PAPI randomly selected 200 locations in 93 districts of 30 provinces to conduct its survey in 2010, and subsequently rolled out the survey nationally in 2011 and 2012. Using 2011 and 2012 survey data, the authors compare the quality of governance and public services reported in provinces and districts that were covered in the 2011 PAPI survey with those that were not surveyed in 2010. Theories suggest that local authorities may improve their behavior if they have been surveyed and are, thus, aware that they are being monitored, leading to higher quality governance.

In this paper, the authors find that governance quality reported in later years by citizens in the surveyed provinces and districts of the 2010 PAPI survey was significantly higher than the quality reported by citizens in locations that were not surveyed in 2010. Monitoring appears to improve a wide range of governance aspects, including local participation in village decisions, transparency of local decision-making, accountability, administrative procedures and public service delivery.

The main innovation of this study is to use a randomized survey on governance as a natural experiment to measure the impact of monitoring on the quality of governance and public services, as reported by citizens.

Social engineering is a prominent aspect of online crime. Various interventions have been developed to reduce the success of this type of attacks. This paper aims to investigate if interventions can help to decrease the vulnerability to social engineering attacks. If they help, the authors investigate which forms of interventions and specific elements constitute success.

The authors selected studies which had an experimental design and rigorously tested at least one intervention that aimed to reduce the vulnerability to social engineering. The studies were primarily identified from querying the Scopus database. The authors identified 19 studies which lead to the identification of 37 effect sizes, based on a total sample of N = 23,146 subjects. The available training, intervention materials and effect sizes were analysed. The authors collected information on the context of the intervention, the characteristics of the intervention and the characteristics of the research methodology. All analyses were performed using random-effects models, and heterogeneity was quantified.

The authors find substantial differences in effect size for the different interventions. Some interventions are highly effective; others have no effect at all. Highly intensive interventions are more effective than those that are low on intensity. Furthermore, interventions with a narrow focus are more effective than those with a broad focus.

The results of this study show differences in effect for different elements of interventions. This allows practitioners to review their awareness campaigns and tailor them to increase their success.

The authors believe that this is the first study that compares the impact of social engineering interventions systematically.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the Philadelphia Police Department instituted a large‐scale randomized controlled trial of foot patrol as a policing strategy and experienced 23 percent fewer violent crimes during the treatment period. The authors examine whether activities patrol officers were conducting might have produced the crime reduction. The activities of foot and car patrol officers research takes a closer look at what types are examined separately and differences between car patrol activities pre‐intervention and during the intervention are explored. Activities of foot versus car patrol officers during the study period are compared across treatment and control areas.

Official data on police officer activity are used to compare activities conducted by foot patrol officers with those by car patrol officers in 60 treatment (foot beat) and 60 control areas consisting of violent crime hot spots. Activities of car patrol officers are described pre‐intervention and during the intervention. Foot patrol officers’ activities are described within treatment and control areas during the treatment phase of the experiment. Car patrol officers’ activities are reported separately. The statistical significance of changes in car patrol activity pre and during intervention is evaluated using a series of mixed model ANOVAs.

There were noticeable differences in the activities conducted by foot and car patrol. Foot patrol officers spent most of their time initiating pedestrian stops and addressing disorder incidents, while car patrol officers handled the vast majority of reported crime incidents. Car patrol activity declined in both treatment and control areas during the intervention but there was no statistically significant difference between the treatment and the control areas.

The major limitation of this study is the restricted set of data describing officer activity that is captured by official records. Future studies should include a more robust ethnographic component to better understand the broad spectrum of police activity in order to more effectively gauge the ways in which foot patrol and car‐based officers’ activities interact to address community safety. This understanding can help extend the literature on “co‐production” by highlighting the safety partnerships that may develop organically across individual units within a police organization.

The study provides evidence that individual policing strategies undertaken by agencies impact one another. When implementing and evaluating new programs, it would be beneficial for police managers and researchers to consider the impact on activities of the dominant patrol style, as necessary, to understand how a specific intervention might have achieved its goal or why it might have failed to show an effect.

The research contributes to the understanding of the separate and joint effects of foot and car patrol on crime. In addition, it provides police managers with a clearer picture of the ways in which foot patrol police and car‐based officers work to co‐produce community safety in violent inner‐city areas.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate an experiment to improve residents’ opinions of the police in Portland, Oregon. Officers conducted community engagement patrols (CEPs) in 60 high-crime areas. The CEPs prioritized non-investigative contacts with community members to build trust and promote positive police–community interactions in designated high-crime locations. It is hypothesized that community members living in/near intervention sites would report greater exposure to officers, more positive interactions and feel more positively about police than residents in control areas.

In total, 90 crime hot spots were identified using crime reports and calls for service. Locations were randomized into three groups: 2 CEPs/day (n=30), 4 CEPs/day (n=30), and control (i.e. no supplemental patrols, n=30). Officers were dispatched to treatment locations via the computer-aided dispatch system for 90 consecutive days, resulting in 16,200 scheduled CEPs. Surveys were mailed to 11,760 households immediately after the intervention ended and 1,537 were returned (13.1 percent).

Residents from intervention areas reported a higher number of positive police contacts, whereas contacts that residents perceived as negative did not differ between the three conditions. Community attitudes, including perceived police legitimacy, were generally unaffected by CEP dosage.

This paper documents the outcomes of a large-scale field experiment seeking to improve public attitudes toward police using directed CEPs in crime hot spots. Whereas the intervention succeeded in providing more opportunities for positive contact with police, attitude change may necessitate longer-term strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the benefits of integrating IT tracking and routing systems into last-mile distribution operations. The paper also demonstrates the role of field experiments as a valid approach for improving the rigour of logistics research.

The study employs a field experiment approach. Data were collected before and after the experimental treatment from 16 participating vehicles, which were used as inputs and outputs to calculate vehicles' efficiencies using data envelopment analysis.

Through employing manipulation and random assignment to investigate causality in naturally occurring contexts, the study results show statistical evidence for the role of vehicle tracking and routing systems in enhancing fleet efficiency. Furthermore, results show that field experiment is an appropriate method for capital budgeting of deploying IT systems in the distribution function.

Distribution managers can use a field experiment setup to assess the potential impact of installing IT solutions prior to large-scale implementation or prior to purchasing.

The study fills a gap in the literature through the application of a field experiment approach to establish causality relationships in distribution and logistics research. This study should encourage new research on the role of field experimentation in evaluating the benefits gained from, and the capital budgeting of, the modern disruptive technologies in supply chains.

In light of Facebook-based viral marketing and social commerce, the purpose of this paper is to test the moderating role of social identification with the Facebook profile owner (celebrity as aspirational reference group vs ingroup member (college student, same school) vs outgroup member (college student, different school)) in Facebook-based fashion brand marketing and management.

A randomized between-subjects experiment (celebrity’s Facebook profile vs ingroup member’s Facebook profile vs outgroup member’s Facebook profile vs control condition, n=73) was conducted. The sample was composed of college students recruited from a subject pool in a US university.

Results of multiple regression analyses indicate that social identification with the Facebook profile owner and ingroup vs outgroup perception moderate the influence of consumers’ materialism, fashion involvement and opinion leadership on interpersonal attraction to the celebrity, wishful identification with the celebrity, emotional quotient, involvement with the ads, advertising believability and willingness to buy the advertised fashion products. Furthermore, the results of structural equation modeling analyses show that source credibility perception (both the celebrity who endorses her own brand and the Facebook profile owner) mediates the relationship between experimental conditions (celebrity as aspirational outgroup vs same school student as an ingroup member vs different school student as an outgroup member) and the outcome variables (interpersonal attraction to the celebrity, involvement with ads, and advertising believability) in viral marketing leveraging a social media platform.

This study makes several theoretical contributions to consumer psychology and provides managerial implications for Facebook-based fashion marketing and fashion brand management.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of using foreign languages on cooperative behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma setting. The cultural accommodation hypothesis suggests that people are less cooperative in English, associated with the Anglophone cultural cluster, than in French, which is – as is Belgium – associated with the more cooperative Latin European cultural cluster.

Choices are framed as pricing strategies in the context of duopolistic competition. In total, 422 Flemish-Belgium participants with English and French as foreign and Dutch as their native language played in one of three language treatments.

While the authors observe differences between the native and both foreign languages, which are moderated by gender, the authors do not find any difference in effects between the two foreign languages that are associated with different cultures. Extending cultural accommodation arguments, the data suggests an effect specific to the use of the two selected foreign languages.

The authors contribute to this literature by reporting an experimental test of cultural accommodation and alienation effects related to two foreign languages. The authors explore novel arguments, related to cognitive psychology and gender effects.