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This paper synthesizes the extant research on the outcome effect in the accounting domain, focusing primarily on the context of performance evaluation. It reviews the current state of our knowledge about this phenomenon, including its underlying cognitive and motivational causes, the contexts in which the outcome effect is observed, the factors that influence its various manifestations, and ways in which undesirable outcome effects can be mitigated. It also considers various perspectives about the extent to which outcome effects represent undesirable judgmental bias, and whether this distinction is necessary to motivate research on this topic. The paper is intended to motivate and facilitate future research into the effects of outcome knowledge on judgment in the accounting context. Therefore, we also identify important unanswered questions and discuss opportunities for future research throughout the paper. These include additional consideration of instances in which the outcome effect is reflective of bias, how this bias can be effectively mitigated, ways in which outcome information influences judgment (regardless of whether this influence is considered normative), and how the underlying causes of the outcome effect operate singly and jointly to bring about the outcome effect. We also consider ways that future research can contribute to practice by determining how to encourage evaluators to retain and incorporate the relevant information conveyed by outcomes, while avoiding the inappropriate use of outcome information, and by enhancing external validity to increase the generalizability of experimental results to scenarios frequently encountered in practice.

Each production unit is responsible for the protection of the environment. The restricted undesirable production effects lower environmental damage. This paper emphasizes a proportional reduction of the undesirable outputs, and it supports the growth of desirable outputs as much as possible as well. The two-stage proposed model not only considers the viewpoint of the managers to follow the environmental regulations but also it assigns some bounds on producing undesirable factors according to international environmental protocols. Additionally, the restricted bounds on the undesirable outputs, in both stages, enhance the discriminatory ability of the model.

Two-stage network structure based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied as the main methodology for this paper. The advantages of the proposed model are appointed to assess the environmental units.

Comparing with the existing models, the proposed approach presents a new two-stage model to deal with the environmental issues. Furthermore, the discriminatory ability of the efficiency scores is improved. The distribution of this model is greater than the existing ones.

This paper is fully written, submitted and revised during limitations caused by coronavirus .

The proposed method is employed in two different cases. The efficiency scores of 25 power plants and 13 poultry farms are determined. In fact, the undesirable outputs never meet zero in the process of production but they can be reduced. The results of this research support the effect of the undesirable factors' restriction on the reduction scenario. Both of the examples show that imposing the upper bounds for the undesirable products provide low-efficiency results in comparison with the existing model. On the other hand, the results cover the arguments of sustainability in the evaluation of environmental efficiency.

In the production process, desirable outputs and undesirable factors are produced jointly so undesirable factors never meet zero. This paper develops a new two-stage method to reduce the undesirable outputs at each stage. First, the model confirms the reduction of undesirable outputs. Second, this model imposes restrictions on intermediate and final undesirable outputs according to environmental rights and the concerns of the managers. The model increases the discrimination of the efficiency assessment of real-life two-stage environmental systems as well. Then it focuses on the production of desirable outputs. The new objective function is defined according to the aim of the proposed model that not only declares better efficiency decomposition to the individual system but also the efficiency score is evaluated for each stage.

The purpose of this study is to examine the unintended consequences of actions as one of the central and constituent elements of sociological theory and long debated in the history of sociology. This question has been treated under varying sociological terminologies, including, providence, social forces, social paradoxes, heterogeneity of ends, immanent causality and the principle of emergency.

This paper is concerned with “adverse effects”. The thematic contexts of “unintended consequences of social action” the authors wish to focus attention on are specific types of consequences which may merit the adjective “adverse”.

The analysis of the intentions of our actions and their unwanted or foreseen consequences allows us to understand how societies work. Many historical facts are probably “unintentional.” But, most continuous or changing life forms must be interpreted as a mixture of intentional (social reproduction) and unintentional consequences (social change).

This paper focuses on four points of view: the object of sociology, the problems of order and social change, the methodological status of the discipline and the nature of social explanation, and mathematical theory. Four classifications of unintended consequences are formulated from the works of Boudon, Baert and Ramos, as well as the authors.

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology to structure the problem of retail out of stock (OOS). This methodology allows investigating risk factors and barriers related to the main causes and consequences that lead to OOS occurring.

The proposed methodology to structure the OOS problem is based on the bow- ie tool, which allows better visualisation, understanding and analysis of a complete OOS scenario. This proposal comprises exploring the main causes and consequences of OOS, the barriers to prevention and mitigation, the escalation factors to control undesirable events and to define actions to eliminate or mitigate the OSS risk.

Several potential causal risk factors, related to technical, behavioural, cultural and organisational aspects, were identified with this methodology. With the analysis of the OOS scenario, it was observed that the factors that lead to the OOS risk are preventable. In order to improve existing barriers or implement new barriers, a set of actions can be recommended to reduce or eliminate OOS risk factors.

From a better understanding of hazard, the bow-tie methodology allows identifying crucial factors that could be acted upon to reduce the incidence of OSS. Thus, the value is to propose a methodology that allows establishing the preventive and protective barriers necessaries and the escalation factors related to each of these to help structure the problem and consequently reduce the OOS in retail organisations.

To protect against the increasing environmental degradation many agents choose today to replace consumption of depleted environmental goods with that of privately produced substitute goods. The present paper aims to highlight how this “self‐protective” behaviour that is increasingly frequent in modern societies may affect the welfare of the individuals.

The paper presents a combination of narrative with argument and analysis. It first provides several examples of self‐protective choices to give a heuristic view of this phenomenon and then examines their effects through a simple evolutionary model that leads the reader beyond a purely intuitive understanding of the substitution mechanism described in the first part.

The paper shows that replacing environmental goods with artificial substitute goods may give rise to an “undesiderable growth” process, that is, a vicious circle between environmental degradation and private consumption which contributes to economic growth but may have negative effects on the welfare of the agents.

The paper investigates an aspect of the link between environmental degradation and economic growth that has been mainly ignored in the literature so far. While most contributions have underlined that self‐protective choices can boost economic growth, the paper goes one step forward and shows that they can actually give rise to a self‐reinforcing growth process in which environmental degradation increases economic growth and viceversa, leading the economy on a welfare‐reducing path.

The paper seeks to evaluate the changes in efficiency and productivity of coal‐fired electricity generation of 30 Chinese administrative regions from 1999 to 2007.

The paper incorporates data envelopment analysis with the Malmquist index to study the progress made in this sector. The model considers both economic and environmental factors by including the variables fuel consumption, labor, capital, sulfur dioxide emissions and electricity generated. A second model is constructed without the variable sulfur dioxide emissions to evaluate economic performances without taking environmental measures into consideration.

By comparing the two models, the paper identified provinces that favored economic performance over environmental performance, or vice versa. Also, it showed that the more efficient provinces tend to manage both economic and environmental efficiencies equally well, while the reverse is true for the least efficient provinces. The average total factor productivity growth in coal‐fired electricity generation of all provinces was 3.96 per cent for 1999‐2007, and this growth is mainly attributed to technological change. In addition, it found that the Eastern provinces are the most efficient and productive of the group.

In the absence of provincial coal quality data, a key efficiency factor is missing from the analysis.

Efficiency improvement efforts in the Chinese generation sector should target the least efficient provinces identified in this paper. Practices in the most efficient provinces should be further investigated to be replicated when possible.

The paper provides a contemporary overview of Chinese provincial efficiency and productivity measures for policy makers and investors to improve China's coal‐fired electricity generation sector.

Cement as one of the major components of construction activities, releases a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, resulting in adverse environmental impacts and high energy consumption. Increasing demand for CO₂ consumption has urged construction companies and decision-makers to consider ecological efficiency affected by CO₂ consumption. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a method capable of analyzing and assessing the eco-efficiency determining factor in Iran’s 22 local cement companies over 2015–2019.

This research uses two well-known artificial intelligence approaches, namely, optimization data envelopment analysis (DEA) and machine learning algorithms at the first and second steps, respectively, to fulfill the research aim. Meanwhile, to find the superior model, the CCR model, BBC model and additive DEA models to measure the efficiency of decision processes are used. A proportional decreasing or increasing of inputs/outputs is the main concern in measuring efficiency which neglect slacks, and hence, is a critical limitation of radial models. Thus, the additive model by considering desirable and undesirable outputs, as a well-known DEA non-proportional and non-radial model, is used to solve the problem. Additive models measure efficiency via slack variables. Considering both input-oriented and output-oriented is one of the main advantages of the additive model.

After applying the proposed model, the Malmquist productivity index is computed to evaluate the productivity of companies over 2015–2019. Although DEA is an appreciated method for evaluating, it fails to extract unknown information. Thus, machine learning algorithms play an important role in this step. Association rules are used to extract hidden rules and to introduce the three strongest rules. Finally, three data mining classification algorithms in three different tools have been applied to introduce the superior algorithm and tool. A new converting two-stage to single-stage model is proposed to obtain the eco-efficiency of the whole system. This model is proposed to fix the efficiency of a two-stage process and prevent the dependency on various weights. Converting undesirable outputs and desirable inputs to final desirable inputs in a single-stage model to minimize inputs, as well as turning desirable outputs to final desirable outputs in the single-stage model to maximize outputs to have a positive effect on the efficiency of the whole process.

The performance of the proposed approach provides us with a chance to recognize pattern recognition of the whole, combining DEA and data mining techniques during the selected period (five years from 2015 to 2019). Meanwhile, the cement industry is one of the foremost manufacturers of naturally harmful material using an undesirable by-product; specific stress is given to that pollution control investment or undesirable output while evaluating energy use efficiency. The significant concentration of the study is to respond to five preliminary questions.

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, the authors investigate the influence of other customer perception (OCP) on focal customer’s service quality perception and service revisit intention in hotel services. Second, they examine whether negative effects of OCP can be managed through customer participation. Finally, they examine the effectiveness of CP as a strategy when individuals vary in terms of their need for uniqueness (NFU).

A 2 (OCP: favorable versus unfavorable) × 2 (customer participation: customer participation versus no customer participation) × 2 (NFU: high versus low) between-subjects experiment was conducted to collect responses. Analysis of variance and pre-planned contrast tests were carried out to test the hypotheses.

Customers who are exposed to unfavorable OCP reported low service quality evaluation and revisit intention. However, two-way interaction results supported that in unfavorable OCP situation, customers who are exposed to high customer participation have reported high revisit intention compared to those who are not exposed to customer participation. In addition, the three-way interaction effects indicate that customer participation may work as an intervention mechanism to reduce the negative effects of OCP to form favorable service quality perception and revisit intention only for customers with low NFU.

This is the first in its stream of studies examining the following research questions: “Can the negative effects of OCP be mitigated with the help of managerial intervention?”; and “Would a customer’s individual differences influence the effectiveness of such an intervention strategy?”

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a survey designed to: capture the “real world” experiences of people active in project management (PM) in Australia, Canada and the UK; determine the extent to which those involved in the management of projects make use of the methods and techniques that are available; and discover how effective the methods and techniques are felt to be.

A questionnaire comprising 24 questions with a mixture of yes/no, Likert‐scale, multiple choice and open questions was developed. These were designed so that the data gathered could be compared with the results of a similar survey conducted in the UK a decade ago. Professional networks and direct e‐mails were used to distribute the survey electronically to potential respondents who were actively involved in PM in the three countries. A total of 150 responses are used in the analysis, 50 from each country.

The results show that there are many areas where the experiences, practices and views are similar across all three countries and are comparable to the earlier UK survey. However, as is often the case, it is perhaps the differences that are of most interest and these are commented upon throughout the paper.

This paper sheds light on current practice across three countries and presents a useful historical perspective on PM trends in practice and rates of credentialization of those surveyed. It also provides useful quantitative results that can be used to more broadly speculate and make sense of other qualitative studies.