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This paper aims to show that some astute leaders have learned to look for opportunity in surprises, sometimes discovering important strategic variables that contribute to long‐term success.

The paper proposes that market analysis surprises be routinely mined and sifted for bigger and better ideas, strategies and solutions.

Leaders need to learn how to harness the latent opportunities that reside within the inevitable surprises they will experience. Shaping how customers encounter surprise can actually make the difference between a trivial product or service experience and a memorable one that builds excitement and loyalty.

In the case of both Intuit's Quickbooks and Canon's Mark II camera, customer segments outside of the intended target revealed surprising market opportunities.

The author offers a matrix for identifying four tactical responses managers have for harnessing surprise: Seek & Shape, Prepare & Pivot, Catch & Capitalize, and React & Respond.

The main purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether hotel hospitality mediates and/or moderates the relationships between surprise experience and customer delight in the context of hotel services. This study, involving 300 Malaysian and non-Malaysian hotel guests, employs questionnaire surveys as the main data collection method. The results indicate that there is a strong and positive relationship between surprise and customer delight, and hotel hospitality mediates and also moderates the abovementioned direct relationship.

Financial analysts act as crucial conduits of information between firms and stakeholders. However, comparatively little is known about how these information intermediaries evaluate the believability and importance of corporate disclosures. We argue that a firm’s level of managerial discretion, or latitude of executive action, acts as a cue for financial analysts, which helps them interpret and respond to voluntary management earnings forecasts. Our study provides strong, robust evidence that financial analysts find management forecasts significantly less believable in low-discretion than in high-discretion environments, and therefore tend to be much less responsive to these forecasts. We also show that managerial discretion is especially impactful on analysts’ responses in those circumstances where analysts are typically most uncertain about how to interpret management forecasts.

While regular price discount (RPD) promotions remain popular, marketers have also introduced gambled price discounts (GPDs) in recent years. There is a need to understand the performance and limitation of the relatively novel GPD, because the importance of pricing and the surprise element inherent in GPD could cause the promotions to backfire when inappropriately applied. This study compared the performance of GPD and RPD via consumers' perception of their attractiveness through quality cues of product types (experience and search goods) and word-of-mouth (WOM) content (affective and cognitive).

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied on a 2 (product type: experience goods [hotel rooms] vs. search goods [printers]) × 2 (word-of-mouth type: affective vs. cognitive) × 2 (price promotion type: GPD vs. RPD) between-subjects scenario experimental design (resulting in eight conditions).

Analysis of the 600 returns revealed that RPD does well for both search and experience goods, but GPD is more attractive for the marketing of experience goods. GPD works better with cognitive than with affective WOM.

GPD is a relatively new domain in marketing research. This study contributes to GPD literature and behavioral pricing literature. The study also adds to a better understanding of the dynamics, usefulness and limitations of GPD by considering the roles played by surprise element inherent in GPD and comparing it with RPD.

This study aims to explore the influence of surprise and delight on the loyalty intentions of retail banking customers in an emerging market context. This study also considers the moderating effect of trust on these relationships.

Using convenience and purposive sampling methods, data collection was secured from 350 customers in the retail banking industry who are delighted with their banks.

This study found that for delightful experiences to occur, customers need to be surprised and see value in the product/service offered by the retail bank, coupled with the expertise of employees in delivering the service.

The sample’s demographic profile was mostly skewed towards the younger generation (individuals 20–39 years of ages), meaning the results could be biased towards this group.

Retail banks need to create delightful experiences, as they are more memorable and leave a permanent mark in customers’ minds.

Limited studies have explored the relationship between delight, its antecedents and outcomes in a developing African market context, such as Botswana, hence the contribution of this study to literature.

Recent research on local bias provides evidence that investors' portfolios include a non‐negligible allocation to stocks in firms that are geographically proximate to the investors. The reasons postulated for local bias include familiarity with firms, “word‐of‐mouth” communication effects, and ability to exploit local news. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the value‐relevance of local news, specifically earnings announcement surprises, in the context of the well‐documented local bias in investors' portfolios.

Using a hand‐collected panel dataset spanning 15 years of quarterly earnings announcements of publicly traded firms, abnormal stock returns engendered by earnings surprises based on local newspaper announcements are compared to those from earnings surprises based on financial analysts' forecasts (I/B/E/S).

In contrast to the case, when both sources of earnings surprises are negative, the authors find a statistically significant differential stock price effect in a sample where local firms' earnings announcements in the local newspaper signal positive earnings surprises, but the earnings surprise based on financial analysts' forecasts is negative. This result remains after controlling for time‐ and firm‐fixed effects. In additional tests, the authors establish that the result is predicated on a local firm's earnings announcement being reported in the local newspaper.

The paper's findings suggest that the results of empirical research on the information content of earnings surprises based solely on analysts' forecasts should be interpreted with caution. It was found that the stock price impact of earnings surprises is also significantly influenced by local newspaper reports of the announced quarterly earnings of local firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements, which includes information about the targeted Federal fund rate and revision to the future path of monetary policy on Southeast Asian stock market performance.

This paper has used a sample of five national equity market indexes over the period 1997-2013 that covers 132 scheduled FOMC meetings. The authors have developed the model of Wongswan (2009) and Kontonikas et al. (2013) to quantify target surprise and path surprise.

The results first show that all the stock markets examined do respond to information in FOMC announcements. Second, the target Federal fund rate has more impact on Southeast Asian stocks performance than information about the future path of monetary policy does. Third, different Southeast Asian equity markets respond similarly to targeting the Federal fund rate, while the responses to monetary policy differ from each other. Fourth, the response of each country to the FOMC announcement is not statistically different in the two periods of financial crisis.

Southeast Asian financial markets are increasingly highly correlated to the US market. The main channel in which FOMC announcement has impact on Southeast Asian stock markets is through US price transmission. This is the case of foreign firms borrowing from the US market. Then, an increase in interest rate, which means that the cost of financing increases, will lower firm equity value.

The understanding of the response of the Southeast Asian stock markets to target surprise and path surprise, and the impact of each surprise in different time periods, would be important to investors and encourage further discussion amongst academics in Southeast Asia, where stock markets have been emerging in recent years.

Over the last years, the concept of customer delight has moved into the focus of attention. The necessity of surprise for achieving customer delight and the problem of increased customer expectation (spiral of expectations) have been controversially discussed in the literature. The purpose of the paper is therefore to investigate whether customer delight necessarily requires surprise and whether a misdirected delight strategy can backfire by creating disloyal customers.

This study employs a 2 (after-sales extra value: yes vs no)×2 (knowledge about the extra value: yes vs no) between-subject, scenario-based experiment (n=472) in a hotel environment and partial least squares structural equation modeling to analyze the data.

Study results show that surprise is not a necessary prerequisite for achieving customer delight, but its presence strengthens the delight experience for the customer, positively impacting customer loyalty intentions. Conversely, a surprising nonoccurrence of an expected delight measure causes anger, inducing negative word of mouth and reduced repurchase intentions.

To pursue a sustainable customer delight approach, companies should recognize that they do not need to surprise their customers on every occasion, but rather ensure that customers do not fall short of anticipated delightful events.

The current research strives to contribute to the theory and practice by shedding light on two so far not appropriately addressed research areas of customer delight: the necessity of surprise to evoke customer delight and the consequences of absent but expected delight measures.

This paper aims to examine the interesting but largely unexamined effects of pride-tagged money and surprise-tagged money on consumers’ spending and product-choosing behaviors.

The present research utilizes experimental design and survey methods to collect data and the ANOVA and bootstrap analysis methods to verify the assumed hypotheses.

Study 1 shows that people with pride-tagged (vs surprise-tagged) money are more likely to spend the money for themselves (vs others) and the personal achievement-expression motive plays a mediating role between the pride-tagged money and self-spending behavior. Study 2 replicates the findings of Study 1 and suggests that people with pride-tagged money are less likely to spend the money for others (e.g. donating). Study 3 shows that people with pride-tagged (surprise-tagged) money are more likely to purchase a self-relevant (other-relevant) product than those with surprise-tagged (pride-tagged) money.

The current research has classified products into self-relevant products (e.g. fitness card, supermarket gift card and mobile game equipment) and other-relevant products (e.g. restaurant set meal, pizza, movie ticket and hot pot) on the basis of perceived self-relevance on the products. Therefore, marketers could frame certain conditions that elicit self-relevant versus other-relevant choices and manipulate self-relevant versus other-relevant primes to shift preferences in favor of certain options. For example, around graduation time, graduates often feel proud of their accomplishments. In this case, marketers could take advantage of that feeling with a message like “treat yourself”, which could prompt them to spend more money for themselves. In addition, the marketers selling other-relevant products (e.g. pizza and hot pot) might develop and promote advertisements that deliver information about “sharing with your friends”. For example, in 2016, Pizza Hut began to use its new slogan of “love to share” to convey the idea of “double happiness as a result of sharing”.

From a theoretical standpoint, first, this research contributes to the emotional accounting research by advancing the notion that money associated with different positive feelings could influence consumers’ spending behaviors in different ways. Second, the research distinguishes self-relevant products from other-relevant products. Third, it shows that people with pride-tagged money and those with surprise-tagged money have different preferences for products. Self-relevant products, such as fitness card, supermarket gift card and mobile game equipment, that represent a certain degree of independence are more used and/or consumed by consumers with pride-tagged money, whereas other-relevant products, such as restaurant set meal, pizza, movie ticket and hot pot, that involve the perceptions of interdependence are more bought by consumers with surprise-tagged money to share with others.

This paper aims to investigate the informational content of earnings surprises and accounting information in credit default swap (CDS) markets.

This paper analyzes a sample of 444 US firms and 6,907 earnings announcements. By means of parametric and non-parametric event study analysis, the paper assesses the informational value and the timeliness in the assimilation of earnings surprises by CDS rates.

This paper shows that earnings surprises contain material information and that CDS rates are affected by the disclosure of obligors’ financial statements. There is also supporting evidence that positive and negative surprises induce asymmetric reactions on CDS rates, especially after accounting for the credit risk of the obligor and the liquidity of the CDS contract. Finally, and perhaps the most interesting conclusion of the study, there is evidence that earnings disclosed during unstable periods lack informational value, in opposition to normal periods.

As compared with similar studies, this paper presents three novel contributions. The first concerns the use of non-parametric analysis in parallel with parametric tests to achieve robust conclusions. The second novel contribution resides in assessing whether the liquidity of the CDS contracts affects the information value of earnings surprises or the timeliness at which the information is assimilated into CDS rates. Finally, this paper also contributes to improve our understanding on the relationship between the business cycle and the informativeness of accounting information.