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The increasing availability of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) financial statements motivates additional investigation of whether XBRL’s search-facilitating technology (SFT) and enhanced viewing capabilities facilitate information search and improve financial analysis decision quality and efficiency. This experiment investigates how using XBRL technology to view financial statements influences novice investors’ decision quality by affecting decision processes such as search strategy and effort, as well as decision efficiency (accuracy/effort) in a financial statement analysis task. In the experiment, randomly assigned student participants (n = 102) invested in companies using either static PDF-formatted or XBRL-enabled financial statements. No differences in decision quality (i.e., accuracy) due to technology use were observed. However, participants in the XBRL condition examined less information, used more directed search processes, and evidenced greater efficiency than did participants assigned to the PDF condition. Hence, the results suggest that XBRL SFT affects the use of differing decision processes relative to PDF technology.

This chapter examines the application of exploratory sequential mixed methods design in the context of small accommodation enterprises (i.e., home-stay). This study, therefore, discusses the exploratory sequential mixed methods of data collection and analysis and provides practical illustrations based on a study of small tourism enterprise sustainability practices in Ghana. The findings demonstrate that mixed methods overcome the weaknesses of a mono-method and offer an in-depth understanding of tourism and hospitality phenomena. In addition to providing a practical guide to emerging tourism scholars, the current study highlights the ability of mixed methods to develop emerging practitioners' skills in both qualitative and quantitative data. In conclusion, the exploratory sequential mixed methods design offers pragmatic data collection techniques that are non-existent in mono-methods. Accordingly, it is recommended for exploring research questions when there is limited information and high flexibility is needed.

Individual rationality sometimes leads to collectively irrational outcomes, a fundamental problem in the social and life sciences that has attracted sustained attention from experimentalists in sociology, psychology, biology, and economics. But what is it about individual rationality that sometimes gets us into trouble? Is the problem the egoistic pursuit of individual self-interest? Or does the problem with individual rationality lie elsewhere? To find an answer, this chapter closely examines the theoretical and experimental literature on social dilemmas, to see how researchers identify the source of the problem. The review suggests that the prevailing theory wrongly points to egoism as the problem. Failing to do what is best for everyone can also happen among rational altruists, and sometimes egoism is needed to prevent it. The chapter concludes by pointing to what we believe is the fundamental problem – a tension not between individual self-interest and collective welfare, but between individual autonomy and collective interdependence.

Understanding how leaders make foreign policy and national security decisions is of paramount importance for the policy community and academia. It is our assertion that decisions in these domains can be explained best by tracing the cognitive process leaders go through in formulating and arriving at their decisions, using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method (Mintz, 2005; Mintz & DeRouen, 2010).

Consequently, this chapter summarizes the Applied Decision Analysis method which is utilized throughout the chapters comprising this volume. We then discuss the findings presented in this volume, while demonstrating the merit of both ADA and the poliheuristic theory of decision (Mintz, 2004), in the robust analyses of decisions made by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Winston Churchill, Mao Zedong, Barack Obama, Saddam Hussein, Khaled Mashal, Muammar Gaddafi, Pieter Botha, and Frederik de Klerk. We conclude by providing a brief summary of the case studies which are included in this volume.

This chapter concerns itself with a garment factory in Trinidad, West Indies, producing brand-name clothing for the Eastern Caribbean market. Workers in this factory not only stitch garments for an hourly wage; but also stealthily operate a secondary assembly line, creating precise duplicates of the factory's products for themselves to take home and wear. Manufactured on the shop-floor alongside “legitimate” production, the copied garments are identical in every way to the genuine ones they mimic. In this chapter, I argue that workers have created a “loop” in the value chain: a simultaneous moment in which they are both producers and consumers of the factory's products. While “genuine” garments circulate through market-capitalist networks of exchange, copied garments only circulate through social networks – thereby accruing and representing forms of “value” that are distinct from market value. By looping the value chain, factory workers create non-market values alongside market-oriented ones, showing both sets of values to be interdependent. Workers’ own commentary on these processes offers a unique window onto contested meanings of “value” at work on the shop-floor.

Decisions to initiate conflict often have an irrevocable character. They tend to transform the status quo in ways that it is often foreseen only with difficulty beforehand, and this change is then mostly impossible to undo. The sentence attributed to Colin Powell talking to President Bush about the Iraq War, “You break it, you own it,” illustrates the issue quite well. Closely linked to irrevocability is the issue of conflict costs. The uncertainty about conflicts and wars is due not only to the identity of the eventual winner but also to the costs inflicted upon the parties including the victorious ones. Often, prospective losers such as Napoleon and Hitler were initial winners who were in the end defeated by an accumulation of war costs they could not master.11There is some evidence that Napoleon, and then Hitler, were driven by increasing needs to absorb more and more territories. Clearly, Napoleon sold Louisiana to Jefferson to replenish his war chest and Hitler pillaged the central banks of conquered countries to support German military expenses. It is mostly the sunk costs associated with war that account for the irrevocability problem. Unfortunately, the literature on the formal analysis of war has not dealt with this matter, representing instead conflict as involving fixed costs or fixed cost expectancies at the onset. Additional cost estimates that should be taken by a decision-maker due to possible failures or irreversibility of actions are not considered. This is nowhere more evident than in the so-called bargaining model of conflict and war, whose numerous sometimes hidden assumptions have to be discussed and analyzed. The goal of this paper is to show that irrevocable decisions add to the cost of making them. Belligerent parties often have a tendency to minimize these especially, and this is an interesting twist of the analysis of irrevocable decision-making, if estimations of the gains of war are made on the basis of risk neutral expected utility calculations. The latter consideration leads me then to formulate alternative theories of war and conflict under the assumption of rationality.