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This paper investigates the role of economic disagreement in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. Economic disagreement is quantified with ex ante measures of cross-sectional dispersion in economic forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), determining the degree of disagreement among professional forecasters over changes in economic fundamentals.

The authors introduce a broad index of economic disagreement based on the innovations in the cross-sectional dispersion of economic forecasts for output, inflation and unemployment so that the index is a shock measure that captures different aspects of disagreement over economic fundamentals and also reflects unexpected news or surprise about the state of the aggregate economy. After building the broad index of economic disagreement, the authors test out-of-sample performance of the index in predicting the cross-sectional variation in future stock returns.

Univariate portfolio analyses indicate that decile portfolios that are long in stocks with the lowest disagreement beta and short in stocks with the highest disagreement beta yield a risk-adjusted annual return of 7.2%. The results remain robust after controlling for well-known pricing effects. The results are consistent with a preference-based explanation that ambiguity-averse investors demand extra compensation to hold stocks with high disagreement risk and the investors are willing to pay high prices for stocks with large hedging benefits. The results also support the mispricing hypothesis that the high disagreement beta provides an indirect way to measure dispersed opinion and overpricing.

Most literature measures disagreement about individual stocks with the standard deviation of earnings forecasts made by financial analysts and examines the cross-sectional relation between this measure and individual stock returns. Unlike prior studies, the authors focus on disagreement about the economy instead of disagreement about earnings growth. The authors' argument is that disagreement about the economy is a major factor that would explain disagreement about stock fundamentals. The authors find that disagreement in economic forecasts does indeed have a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks.

Recent advances in digital technologies and their accessibility with ease have become indispensable for children. In contrast to expectations and many regulations, children use digital technologies effectively in many areas from an early age. Digital technologies and digital media, commonly used in entertainment, learning and everyday activities, cover several user-induced problems and challenges. These uses are user-based, not technology-based, which highlights conscious, controlled and time-limited applications that are suitable for their developmental levels. On the other hand, technology has many positive effects, such as providing children with efficient and rich learning opportunities, providing concrete experiences, and increasing their academic success and interest. Also, digital technologies are frequently preferred in learning environments due to the visual preparation of technology-supported materials, addressing more than one sensory organ at the same time, and the inclusion of interaction components. However, in this process, the selection and use of current technologies and software suitable for children's development levels and the factors that need to be considered in the process of use are important to make the learning process effective.

The objective of this study is to examine Chinese consumers' behavioural intentions to reduce restaurant food wastage (i.e. intentions to order moderate meal size, and to pack leftovers) in a group context from both psychological and cultural perspectives.

This paper used an online self-administered survey for data collection. The measurements were either adopted or adapted from prior studies on pro-environmental behaviours. Using data from 311 Chinese consumers, the authors analysed restaurant food wastage in China by utilising PLS-SEM.

By applying an extended value-attitude-behaviour (VAB) hierarchy with information publicity, it is found that materialism, frugality consciousness, information publicity and environmental concern are important factors in influencing individuals' behavioural intentions to reduce food waste in a group dining-out context.

Drawing upon perspectives of Chinese consumers, this paper outlines key promoters and barriers to food waste mitigation, and provides meaningful insights to policymakers, NGOs, industry stakeholders and even consumers on how to effectively overcome the food waste challenge at the consumption stage in the context of Chinese culture.

It is known that a conflict exists between consumers’ materialistic and green values. Previous research has focused on values conflict consequences. Antecedents of consumers’ materialistic and green values conflict remain understudied. This study aims to explore the antecedents of consumers’ materialistic and green values conflict.

An exploratory type research design was applied. Overall 22 interviews were conducted with consumers that had materialistic and green values conflict. The transcripts of the interviews were analyzed using content analysis with Maxqda software.

The findings demonstrate consumers' negative attitudes towards consumption, understood as consumerism. Results indicate that value conflict is related to unpleasant emotions such as guilt, anxiety, helplessness and remorse. Guilt is the most prominent emotion associated with the conflict of values. The study identifies dissonant information, environmental knowledge, social norms, impulsive buying and mindfulness as antecedents of materialistic and green values conflict.

The novelty of the study is the antecedents of the materialistic and green values conflict. This study makes a valuable contribution to the academic discourse on sustainable consumption, consumer materialism and green values by providing a deeper understanding of the values conflict experienced by consumers who hold materialistic and green values. The main significance of this study is that it provides valuable insights from qualitative research into the antecedents of the conflict between consumers' materialistic and green values.

The purpose of this paper is to detect the association between qualitative job insecurity and well-being related outcomes and to determine the extent to which cognitive appraisals of job insecurity moderate this association. According to appraisal theory, it is anticipated a hindrance appraisal of job insecurity to amplify and a challenge appraisal of job insecurity to buffer this association.

To test the hypotheses, 250 healthcare employees from different departments of an Iranian large public hospital were recruited. Participants responded to scales on qualitative job insecurity, cognitive appraisals, job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, absenteeism and presenteeism.

Results showed that qualitative job insecurity negatively influenced both psychological and behavioral well-being; however, this influence was greater for psychological well-being than for behavioral well-being. Besides, the moderation tests showed that only the hindrance appraisals of job insecurity amplified the link between job insecurity and psychological outcomes.

This study sampled employees from a public hospital and did not include employees from private hospitals. This may limit the generalizability of the findings. Also, due to using a cross-sectional research design we encourage future studies to replicate the same findings using other different research designs.

The findings aid occupational health psychologists to design particular interventions for protecting those aspects of employee’s well-being that are more vulnerable when qualitative job insecurity is chronically perceived.

Together, these findings suggest that the hindrance appraisals of qualitative job insecurity are more likely to moderate the link between job insecurity and well-being outcomes.

The increasing importance and proliferation of text data provide a unique opportunity and novel lens to study human communication across a myriad of business and marketing applications. For example, consumers compare and review products online, individuals interact with their voice assistants to search, shop, and express their needs, investors seek to extract signals from firms' press releases to improve their investment decisions, and firms analyze sales call transcripts to increase customer satisfaction and conversions. However, extracting meaningful information from unstructured text data is a nontrivial task. In this chapter, we review established natural language processing (NLP) methods for traditional tasks (e.g., LDA for topic modeling and lexicons for sentiment analysis and writing style extraction) and provide an outlook into the future of NLP in marketing, covering recent embedding-based approaches, pretrained language models, and transfer learning for novel tasks such as automated text generation and multi-modal representation learning. These emerging approaches allow the field to improve its ability to perform certain tasks that we have been using for more than a decade (e.g., text classification). But more importantly, they unlock entirely new types of tasks that bring about novel research opportunities (e.g., text summarization, and generative question answering). We conclude with a roadmap and research agenda for promising NLP applications in marketing and provide supplementary code examples to help interested scholars to explore opportunities related to NLP in marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine producer preferences for changing Farm Animal Welfare (FAW) levels in regards to sheep and goat husbandry in Bursa-Turkey.

The paper tests “panel estimators” in a stated preference data by using the payment card question format. Probit panels are employed to measure individual effects on FAW levels by considering producers’ willingness to accept. Three different FAW levels were identified for valuation as “base” level, “better” level, and the “best” level. The current study suggests a protocol with WTA(P) nomenclature to resolve complexity issues in FAW studies by investigating producers rather than consumers because the scenarios regarding FAW levels include quite technical and difficult topics which are vague to consumers.

If half of the total number of the sheep and goats in Turkey are assumed to be in bad animal welfare conditions, which are worse than base level, the non-use benefits of bringing them to at least the base level would be about US$130.3m. Figures would be 166.2m US$/year and 175m US$/year for “better” and “best” FAW conditions, respectively.

This paper provides a contribution to the existing literature by examining the producers’ responses to new FAW schemes. Also it helps policy makers to understand producers’ environmental behavior as well as their sensitivity to FAW schemes.

This paper aims to clarify the differences between students’ travel behaviours in Australia and China and the association between students’ environmental attitudes and their travel behaviours in both countries.

The paper extensively reviewed most of existing literature work on commuting patterns of higher education students with referring to different studies around the world and then used it to build a theoretical framework and conceptual model to relate the travel patterns of students to built environment, personal demographics and environmental knowledge/consideration. An online survey was used with 230 students at Mawson Lakes campus of University of South Australia and Beiyangyuan campus of Tianjin University (China). Statistical tests (i.e. mean test, one-way analysis of variance, factor analysis) were used to analyse the data.

The study reveals that a high dependence on private vehicles amongst students at the Mawson Lakes campus, whilst a more environmentally sustainable modal choice dominated at the Beiyangyuan campus. Those who studied at Mawson Lakes campus tended to have stronger involvement in environmental activities than their counterparts at Beiyangyuan campus, which presented a clear association between environmental awareness and the travel behaviours of the sampled students.

The study focussed on two respective campuses of both universities in Australia and China. Future work could be expanded with students at all campuses of two universities.

The study affirmed the value of nurturing environmental awareness for students in both universities to encourage more environmentally sustainable travel behaviours amongst students. The paper provides policy recommendations such as establishing infrastructure, and facilities for new stream of mobility included sharing bike schemes, which would be very practical due to flexibility and cost effectiveness within University campuses. The paper attempted to transfer lessons from Chinese bike friendly society to Adelaide’s car dominated campus.

This study brings remarkable contributions as comparing university students’ travel behaviours in two different nations. It is the first one in Australia, which links the environmental concerns among university students with their travel behaviours. The paper was successful in getting the gap between theory and practice filled to some extent. The paper has a capability to be used as an evidence-base work in the area of sustainability education.

This study examines the effects of incentive compensation and guanxi, a type of informal personal relationship between people, on the objectivity of Chinese internal auditors. Given that the objectivity of internal auditors is essential for promoting financial reporting quality, it is important to investigate the effectiveness of internal audit functions, especially in emerging markets where the corporate governance mechanisms designed to promote objectivity are less mature.

The research employs a 2 × 2 between participants experiment with 116 graduate accounting student participants.

After controlling for internal auditors’ ethicality, we find that close-guanxi between management and internal auditors and incentive compensation in the form of bonuses based upon meeting earnings targets both have the capacity to impair the objectivity of Chinese internal auditors. Participants were more tolerant of management’s attempts to manage earnings when there was close guanxi or bonus compensation. Further, compensation structure only influenced internal auditors’ support of management when guanxi was distant, but when there was close guanxi between internal auditors and management, internal auditors were unlikely to challenge management regardless of the compensation structure.

Purpose – This chapter examines how we study group dynamics in the organizational behavior literature, in terms of the past, present, and future potential. The goal is to aid researchers in considering studying group processes in their own work.

Methodology/approach – Examples are given of different approaches used to elucidate how group dynamics can be studied in terms of frequencies, phases, and sequences across a variety of group process domains.

Findings – Results of the review suggest that while there has been more interest in studying group dynamics and examples can be found in the literature, there is still much opportunity for additional research. Advancements in theory and methods provide the means for doing so.

Originality/value – Suggestions are provided for groups researchers on how to put their existing recordings of group processes to work.