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Managerial mindset and cognitive bias can be barriers to any transformation strategy. In the case of telework, most employees express willingness to telework, yet, few firms formally enable it during regular business hours. The status quo is a daily commute to the traditional workplace. The purpose of this paper is to test framing interventions designed to harness cognitive biases through choice architecture.

Drawing upon behavioral strategy and prospect theory, this paper presents two studies: quasi-experiments with 146 senior business students and experiments in the field (replication using random assignment and extension) with 84 senior decision makers. Both studies use a one-way between-subjects design and chi-square analysis.

Findings support the proposition that, although cognitive biases can act as barriers to transformation, they can be re-framed through strategic interventions. Specifically, in both studies, there was a drastic increase in adoption simply by changing the way the choice was presented. Findings in the lab were cross-validated in the field. Observed shifts in preferences provide evidence that embedding the right reference point within communications can frame a decision choice more favorably. Findings also support that a bias for an implicitly perceived status quo can be overruled through an explicitly stated reference point.

It is an assumption of behavioral strategy that most individuals simply respond to the gains/loss framing without being influenced by other psychological or contextual factors, and though these effects dissipate through aggregation, it is a limitation nonetheless. Indeed, using an individual construct to explain an organizational phenomenon is a well-debated topic in the field of strategy, with proponents on both sides. The distinguishing factor, here, is that behavioral strategists are only interested in results at the aggregated level.

Practitioners attempting to roll out telework adoption, or any transformation, now have proven strategies for designing frames of reference that intervene against and harness the power of loss aversion and the status quo.

This paper measures micro processes that have an effect at the macro level. It explains systematic aversion to adoption as an aggregation of decision-making behavior that is seemingly subconscious. In doing so, it highlights the impact of bounded rationality perpetuated through social systems, while measuring effective interventions designed to make systematic behavior more predictable.

A novel contribution is made in designing/testing a new frame for systematic resistance to change that frames the status quo as the losing prospect. In this frame, the perceived loss is in the choice not to change, and loss aversion proves to be an effective tool for facilitating systematic change.

When consumers imagine themselves in various consumption scenarios, they can do so from the actor or the observer perspective. These different vantage points are known as imagery perspectives. This paper aims to investigate how imagery perspectives can influence consumers’ decisions to stay with the status quo (default option) or to switch to an alternative.

A series of four experimental design studies were conducted in both lab and online settings to study consumers’ switching tendency and choice. The empirical testing involved products, brands and services, including cameras (Study 1), vacation hotels (Study 2), toilet paper (Study 3) and food (Study 4).

The authors demonstrate that compared with actor imagery that tends to perpetuate the default product and brand choice, observer imagery increases consumers’ tendency to change and switch to new products and brands.

Due to the methods used in empirical testing, the research results may lack generalizability.

Marketers spend a considerable amount of resources in an attempt to get consumers to switch products and brands. The results of this paper shed light on how marketers can promote switching behaviors through imagery perspective.

The research contributes to the streams of research in mental imagery, de-biasing and status quos, which have progressed in isolation from one another to date. This research is one of the first to investigate imagery perspective in the context of choice architecture.

This study explains and predicts smartwatch adoption trends among non-users of smartwatches based on theories of the diffusion of innovation and inertia. It explores the impact of satisfaction with the status-quo with traditional wristwatches, on attitudes toward smartwatches and intentions to adopt the technology.

The study used PLS-SEM to conduct a multi-group analysis considering high (HSQS) and low (LSQS) status-quo satisfaction groups. The multi-group analysis followed the MICOM procedure, and the software SmartPLS three was used to analyse the data.

The results suggest that attitudes of the LSQS group were more strongly impacted by perceived ease of use and trialability. Their attitude toward innovation also had a stronger effect on their adoption intention. For the HSQS group, social influence more strongly impacted adoption intention; this group also perceived the disruption associated with an innovation as greater than the LSQS group. Analysis using PLS-Predict indicated that both models have considerable predictive power.

Most scholarship on this subject has taken a positive view of the diffusion and adoption of smartwatches. This study considers smartwatches from positive and inhibitory perspectives. In the context of smartwatches, this is the first scholarly attempt at comparing levels of resistance to innovation adoption to consumer satisfaction with the status quo.

This article investigates the influence of status quo bias (SQB) on venture capital investments.

The authors use the dynamic panel probit (respectively logit) model for 24 countries over nine years (from 2007–2015).

The authors’ regressions reveal that the SQB is meaningful in real decisions. Indeed, the authors find that the choice of investment sectors depends positively on the previous choice. Moreover, the study identifies other factors that were perceived to influence the choice of the investment industry such as added value by activity and the venture capital (VC) country attractiveness index.

By knowing the behavior of VC FIRMS, entrepreneurs would better frame their business plans and better target the VC to whom they should better contact.

No research has dealt with this question, yet status quo is consensually recognized as an omnipresent institutional factor.

This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist.

This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its current state into the distant future; catastrophe trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilization; technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilization on a fundamentally different course; and astronomical trajectories, in which human civilization expands beyond its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos.

Status quo trajectories appear unlikely to persist into the distant future, especially in light of long-term astronomical processes. Several catastrophe, technological transformation and astronomical trajectories appear possible.

Some current actions may be able to affect the long-term trajectory. Whether these actions should be pursued depends on a mix of empirical and ethical factors. For some ethical frameworks, these actions may be especially important to pursue.

This paper aims to describe two scenarios where the problem of information search interacts with the firm’s investment decisions. Investment decisions cannot be made separately from the need to acquire information.

The scenarios are illustrated with easy-to-follow numerical examples. Vignettes put the numerical examples in their real-world context.

In both scenarios, the firm should choose what might myopically appear as the lower net per value (NPV) alternative to efficiently deal with the information search problem.

Long-term investments are an important topic in the study of both accounting and finance, but it is in the study of accounting where information issues related to long term investments come to the fore. The traditional textbook approach on whether to accept long-term investment opportunities is to use the NPV rule. However, as illustrated in this note, in many important situations where information search is crucial to investment choice, the NPV rule will not lead to efficient investment decisions.

Organizational sustainability has become a priority on many corporate agendas. How to integrate sustainability efforts throughout the organization, however, remains a challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine two factors that potentially enhance incentive effects on employee engagement in environmental objectives: explicit organizational values for sustainability and the performance objective’s complementarity with incented financial objectives.

The authors employed a quasi-experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, including a status quo condition against which the treatments were contrasted. Participants (n=400) were comprised of a cross-section of US employees from a wide range of occupations and industries. A post hoc qualitative analysis provided additional insights.

Incentive effects were enhanced (i.e. preference for the environmental objective was significantly higher) when the environmental project offered complementary benefits for financial objectives, but not when organization values emphasized sustainability. An entrenched status quo bias for financial performance was discerned among a subset of the sample.

Management scholars must pay close attention to the role of implicit norms for financial performance when investigating employee engagement in organizational sustainability efforts. From an applied perspective, framing sustainability objectives to emphasize financial benefits consistent with a financial mission may maximize employee engagement.

This study contributes to understanding of organizational sustainability efforts at the individual employee level of analysis, a conspicuously small part of the organizational research surrounding this topic.

The article provides a conceptual replication and enrichment of the status quo bias theory in the specific context of understanding IT department user resistance and user adoption. The findings can assist technology renewals and associated change management professionals to assess and plan the adoption and active usage of human resource systems.

The authors used survey method to gather data. All items were based on prior literature. They administrated the survey to employees of GOODTECH (name changed), information systems (IS) department members, situated in France. They obtained 103 valid responses along with usage data from the system to run their path model, in order to validate the proposed research model.

The study offers an enriched user resistance model (URM) to understand why IT-savvy employees would resist or adopt new human resource tools. Apart from providing partial validity to status quo bias theory in the French context, the enriched model uses behavioral intention to use as an intermediate variable to explain the influence of two key constructs of the original theory: switching cost and switching benefits. This research provides a better explanatory power to understand the cause of user resistance and new IT use.

The sample size used in the study can be considered as a limitation, although power analysis reveals that the results are significant and valid. The context of the study is also limited to one country and to a specific type of IS implementation scenario. Since the purpose of the paper was to offer contextual theory enhancement, the findings are valid for this purpose.

Digital project managers are offered a framework to increase technology adoption of new human resource tools and evaluate how to reduce user resistance at times of technology renewals. Self-efficacy for change and colleagues’ opinion can indirectly impact behavioral intention to use via switching cost and switching benefit perceptions and thus reducing resistance perceptions as well as increasing adoption of new IT tools in post-implementation phases.

The paper enriches the well-established user resistance theory in IS domain in a context of human resource post-implementation phase by studying IT-savvy end user's perceptions. The paper demonstrates the need to integrate user adoption and user resistance variables in one parsimonious framework and extends support to emerging research on dual focus perspective.

Although materializing the benefits of social media substantially depends on sustained user participation, social media service providers are experiencing a decline in the number of users. Despite the relevance of studying and managing discontinuance behaviors, a systematic empirical investigation remains lacking. The present study draws on the idea of a two-factor model and aims to examine the enabler, inhibitor and their antecedents in the context of social media discontinuance.

The proposed theoretical model was empirically validated through an online survey study of 238 social media users in China.

Findings indicated that two negative outcomes of social media use (i.e. social overload and invasion of privacy) induce regret experience and ultimately foster discontinuance intentions. The development of discontinuance intentions was undermined by the level of inertia, which is rooted in social media habit, sunk costs and affective commitment.

This study draws attention to the fundamental difference between continuance and discontinuance behaviors, advances the existing understanding of postadoption behaviors by focusing on discontinuance inhibitors (e.g. inertia) and develops the first two-factor model for social media discontinuance by integrating the regret and status quo bias literature.

Digital-only banks are emerging as challenger banks to the traditional-bank business model in South Africa. However, traditional-bank customers could resist the use of digital-only banks, theoretically due to their satisfaction with the status quo. Consequently, inertia arising from bias to traditional banks based on status quo satisfaction could engender their resistance to become customers of digital-only banks. The objective of the study, therefore, is to investigate how traditional-bank customers' inertia influences digital-only bank resistance.

Based on a literature review, digital-only bank adoption barriers and cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs were identified as mediators of the influence of inertia on digital-only bank resistance. To test the mediation model empirically, data was collected from 610 traditional-bank-only customers.

The five adoption barriers fully mediate the influence of inertia on cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs. The five barriers in serial with cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs partially mediate the influence of traditional-bank customers' inertia on digital-only bank resistance. Cognitive-based initial distrusting belief is an essential factor in the mechanism underlying the influence of traditional-bank customers' inertia on digital-only bank resistance.

Digital-only banks are relatively new. Research is therefore lacking in consumer behavior explaining the use of digital-only banks by traditional-bank customers in the South African context. A further novelty of the study is the empirical assessment of mechanisms that explain the influence of inertia on cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs, and the influence of inertia on resistance behavior.