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This paper aims to examine whether a film’s search volume causes its ticket sales in different stages of its lifecycle.

This study tests the causality between searches and sales by using an instrumental variable approach. This study exploits the ideas that consumers’ perception of a product’s consumption risk is correlated with their search efforts and consumers use multiple information sources to infer a product’s consumption risk. As an instrument for a focal film’s search volume, this paper uses review disagreement for past movies related to the focal film. This paper incorporates the ideas in a model of weekly online search volume and revenues and apply it to a movie data set.

Films’ search volume influences their revenues only until the opening week. A 10% increase in opening-week search volume generates a 7.4% increase in opening-week revenue, while the same increase in pre-launch search volume generates a 4.1% increase. Although searches are not an influencer of sales from the second week on, the random forest models and cross-validation studies find that weekly search volume is a strong predictor of weekly revenues in this period.

Testing the findings in other product categories is important for generalizing the findings.

This study suggests different usage values for online searches, depending on a film’s lifecycle stages. Furthermore, given that review disagreement has a positive influence on opening-week revenue through searches, managers should encourage diverse opinions about their films until the opening week to increase sales through searches.

Regarding the role of online search, previous studies have maintained the perspective that online search is a predictor of sales. This is the first study that finds causality between searches and sales for films.

Describes a process of adopting a set of review criteria for use in a regional project to improve heart failure management in general practice. Published guideline review criteria were assessed using a protocol examining indicator relevance, practicality and the clinical evidence on which indicators were based. An expert panel with experience in general practice, cardiology and general internal medicine, ethics, and research methodology was used to evaluate the indicators. Good overall agreement was observed with the review criteria. Areas of disagreement related to poor wording of the criteria, the need to incorporate more up‐to‐date evidence and criteria based on weak evidence. A need exists for greater training of health practitioners about how regional indicators can be used as screening tools for quality improvement. Nationally endorsed sets of regularly updated review criteria for common and important conditions would be helpful in guiding similar quality improvement projects.

The purpose of this paper is to review the recent studies on opinion polarization and disagreement.

In this work, recent advances in opinion polarization and disagreement and pay attention to how they are evaluated and controlled are reviewed.

In literature, three metrics: polarization, disagreement and polarization-disagreement index are usually adopted and there is a tradeoff between polarization and disagreement. Different strategies have been proposed in literature which can significantly control opinion polarization and disagreement based on these metrics.

This review is of crucial importance to summarize works on opinion polarization and disagreement and to the better understanding and control of them.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors have become increasingly important in investment decisions, leading to a surge in ESG investing and the rise of sustainable investment assets. Nevertheless, challenges in ESG disclosure, such as quantifying unstructured data, lack of guidelines and comparability, rampantly exist. ESG rating agencies play a crucial role in assessing corporate ESG performance, but concerns over their credibility and reliability persist. To address these issues, researchers are increasingly utilizing machine learning (ML) tools to enhance ESG reporting and evaluation. By leveraging ML, accounting practitioners and researchers gain deeper insights into the relationship between ESG practices and financial performance, offering a more data-driven understanding of ESG impacts on business communities.

The authors review the current research on ESG disclosure and ESG performance disagreement, followed by the review of current ESG research with ML tools in three areas: connecting ML with ESG disclosures, integrating ML with ESG rating disagreement and employing ML with ESG in other settings. By comparing different research's ML applications in ESG research, the authors conclude the positive and negative sides of those research studies.

The practice of ESG reporting and assurance is on the rise, but still in its technical infancy. ML methods offer advantages over traditional approaches in accounting, efficiently handling large, unstructured data and capturing complex patterns, contributing to their superiority. ML methods excel in prediction accuracy, making them ideal for tasks like fraud detection and financial forecasting. Their adaptability and feature interaction capabilities make them well-suited for addressing diverse and evolving accounting problems, surpassing traditional methods in accuracy and insight.

The authors broadly review the accounting research with the ML method in ESG-related issues. By emphasizing the advantages of ML compared to traditional methods, the authors offer suggestions for future research in ML applications in ESG-related fields.

Independent auditors play an important role in increasing the reliability of financial information by giving their professional opinion on the financial statements of business units. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the audit adjustments and financing of companies.

The sample of the study includes 173 Iranian companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) between 2010 and 2017.

There is no significant association between the profit incremental audit adjustments (Disagreement) and financing of companies in the current year and the following year through a loan. Furthermore, there is no meaningful relationship between the earnings downward/upward audit adjustments (Disagreement) and the financing of companies in the current year and the following year through ordinary stocks. However, there is a meaningful relationship between the profit downward audit adjustments (Disagreement) and the financing of firms in the current year through a loan. In general, as Iran's economy is facing severe economic sanctions, the existence of a high inflation rate has led to a steady increase in the stock prices of Iranian companies; hence, investors regardless of audit reports prefer to invest their money in the stock market so that it does not lose its purchasing power. Under these disaster economic circumstances, creditors are less willing to lend to companies with lower profits.

The results of the current study extend the knowledge of previous studies as financial pressures from economic sanctions have both positive and negative psychological effects on corporate financing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how consensus and sequence of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) presented on online hotel review Web sites affect consumers’ attitudes toward the company and intention to stay at a hotel.

This experiment used a 2 (consensus: high/low) × 3 (sequence: positive-negative, neutral, negative-positive) between-subjects design. A total of 165 usable data samples were gathered. Both consensus and sequence were manipulated.

The study revealed that the review consensus overrides the impact of the review sequence such that when review ratings are substantially consistent, consumers’ attitudes and intentions to stay at a hotel are not influenced by the sequence of reviews.

Other variables such as prior experience with the hotel or biases toward the hotel can affect consumer reactions to such online reviews. Future studies need to reflect on such variables that can moderate or mediate the impact of eWOM consensus and sequence.

Our findings suggest that the online consumer review summary information should be used to control the customer message process and when consumer reviews conflict, managers should take note of the sequence in which consumers read the reviews.

This paper adds to the body of scholarly research related to consumer information processing and further demonstrates how individuals integrate opinions from several reviews, especially in the online context.

Increased attention has been placed on identifying and installing evidence-based practices (EBPs) to effectively and efficiently serve students with and at-risk for learning and behavioral challenges. Council for Exceptional Children's (CEC, 2014) Standards for Evidence-Based Practices in Special Education are often used to examine a range of strategies, practices, and programs to ascertain if they are indeed EBPs. Systematic reviews conducted to evaluate the evidence base of these potential EBPs are important as they inform practice. We contend it is important to provide well-vetted procedures for training scholars to conduct systematic reviews with replicable precision. We offer this chapter to assist scholars in conducting systematic reviews to quality appraise the methodological rigor of a body of literature using the CEC Standards for EBPs. We focus on (1) project management considerations and (2) steps and phases to support the development and dissemination of high quality, methodologically rigorous systematic literature reviews.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the current status of corporate environmental strategy (CES) in mainstream business and management literature, and to provide new insights on current studies and future directions for this field of study.

This study performs a systematic literature review of 19,839 papers in selected mainstream management journals and takes 48 CES-focused papers into account for in-depth analysis in the period between 1990 and 2013.

This study shows that the majority of studies have been conducted using data from the USA, focused on a single country, utilized a resource-based view (RBV), and analysed mixed industries. The most popular issue in CES studies is the examination of causality between environmental strategy and a firm’s performance. Second, the stakeholder theory and institutional theory are most frequently used to explain a firm’s motivation to develop CES. A RBV theory is commonly used to explain a firm’s sources in initiating CES. Finally, the results show a lack of comparative studies in mainstream management research.

Due to the limited focus of this study, the findings of this paper can be generalized only to the specific group of databases selected for this research for a given period of time.

This paper fulfils the need for a comprehensive review of CES literature. It provides a literature review and bibliography for the period between 1990 and 2013 for use by both academics and practitioners.

To assess whether interdisciplinary research evaluation scores vary between fields.

The authors investigate whether published refereed journal articles were scored differently by expert assessors (two per output, agreeing a score and norm referencing) from multiple subject-based Units of Assessment (UoAs) in the REF2021 UK national research assessment exercise. The primary raw data was 8,015 journal articles published 2014–2020 and evaluated by multiple UoAs, and the agreement rates were compared to the estimated agreement rates for articles multiply-evaluated within a single UoA.

The authors estimated a 53% agreement rate on a four-point quality scale between UoAs for the same article and a within-UoA agreement rate of 70%. This suggests that quality scores vary more between fields than within fields for interdisciplinary research. There were also some hierarchies between fields, in the sense of UoAs that tended to give higher scores for the same article than others.

The results apply to one country and type of research evaluation. The agreement rate percentage estimates are both based on untested assumptions about the extent of cross-checking scores for the same articles in the REF, so the inferences about the agreement rates are tenuous.

The results underline the importance of choosing relevant fields for any type of research evaluation.

This is the first evaluation of the extent to which a careful peer-review exercise generates different scores for the same articles between disciplines.

Highlights the role played by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), the Treadway Commission, and other professional organizations in furthering the establishment of audit committees in the USA. In the international arena, the UK Cadbury Committee, the Australian Borsch Committee, and the Canadian Macdonald Commission have influenced the widespread use of corporate audit committees in their respective countries. The guidelines on audit committees set by the IIA, AICPA, SEC, and the Treadway Commission have had a tremendous impact worldwide. Cultural differences may, however, limit the formation and effectiveness of audit committees globally even though auditing is a relatively homogeneous profession. The Institute of Internal Auditors, as an international professional association, may wish to consider the cultural dimensions of corporate governance in formulating professional internal auditing standards dealing with the structure and functions of audit committees internationally.