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This study investigated the usefulness of various communication means for providing university study information with prospective students before and during the pandemic for three consecutive academic years.

Students who had recently taken undergraduate program admission indicated how useful communication channels were in providing the information about university studying. Seven communication channels were examined: open/information day, admission talk, campus visit, education fair, admission website, social media and summer activities. The students were asked to complete an online survey at the beginning of an academic year. In the survey, they were asked to indicate the usefulness of each of the communication channels using a five-point Likert scale with the descriptors: 1 = not useful, 2 = slightly useful, 3 = somewhat useful, 4 = useful, 5 = very useful. If students did not have any usage experience with a communication channel, they were asked to choose “no experience.” There were 1798, 1735 and 1961 students at a university in Hong Kong participating in the study in academic years 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22, respectively.

The pandemic has transformed the landscape of the university's ways of marketing channels to communicate with prospective students. The top useful channel of information for students during the pandemic was admission website, followed by social media and then open/information day. Before the pandemic, open/information day was the most useful channel of information for students and then admission website; the least useful one was social media channel. Significant differences were revealed in the usefulness rating on open/information day and social media channel among the three academic years.

The findings facilitate educational managers to determine the appropriate marketing and recruitment strategies for connecting with prospective students under dynamic context in the era of new normal. They helped identify where to focus the marketing efforts to achieve the most impact in particular under budget constraints.

This paper aims to examine differential perceptions of lenders and investors on (1) the use, perceived usefulness, importance and adequacy of annual reports, (2) the importance of qualitative characteristics (QCs) and (3) the perceived impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on financial reporting quality (FRQ) in Sri Lanka.

A questionnaire survey study of practising professionals consisting of Sri Lankan investors (N = 214) and lenders (N = 235).

In relation to (1), lenders and investors rank three out of ten information sources ahead of the remaining seven: both include annual reports and personal knowledge. However, the highest average response for lenders is direct communication with clients, and for investors, it is stock market publications. Within annual reports, both decision-makers identify financial statements as the most useful part. Concerning (2), they both identified understandability as the most important QC followed by timeliness. Relevance ranked last, surprisingly. In relation to (3), both groups perceived that the new IFRS reporting environment improved the FRQ compared to the previous Sri Lanka Accounting Standards regime.

Ranking understandability as the most important QC in terms of decision usefulness contradicts IASB's categorisation. The authors provide empirical data on the perceived degree of success of adopting IFRS in a developing economy.

The authors design a decision-oriented (lending vs investing) and context-specific (IASB's financial reporting framework) questionnaire to examine the perceptions of key capital providers separately on the issues mentioned above in “Purpose” within a developing economy. The survey fits into two aspects of the decision-useful theory: useful to make what decisions and useful to whom.

Recently, people usually use the internet to obtain travel information, when they plan their travel. They especially want to obtain sightseeing spot information from reviews, but there are huge amounts of reviews of sightseeing spots. Users therefore cannot obtain important information from the reviews easily. As described herein, this paper aims to propose a system that automatically extracts and presents welcome news for sightseeing spots from reviews. This proposed Welcome-news is a “useful information” and “unexpected information” related to travel.

The flow for extracting Welcome-news from reviews is simple: A user inputs a sightseeing spot about which to get information; the system obtains reviews of the sightseeing spot and divides each sentence into reviews; the system extracts sentences including Welcome-news keyword(s), and the sentences become useful information; the system extracts unexpected information from useful information based on clustering, and it becomes Welcome-news; and the system presents all Welcome-news to the user.

This paper reports three findings: extraction of useful information for sightseeing spots based on Welcome-news keywords extracted by our experiment and using support vector machine (SVM); extraction of unexpected information for sightseeing spots by clustering; and automatic presentation of Welcome-news.

Numerous studies have extracted information from reviews based on some keywords. This proposed extraction of Welcome-news for travel not only uses keywords but also clusters based on topics. Furthermore, the proposed keywords include general keywords and unique keywords. The former appears for all kinds of sightseeing spots. The latter appears only for sightseeing spot. The authors extracted general keywords manually, and unique keywords using SVM.

This paper aims to examine the usefulness of disclosures provided by Egyptian firms in the management report from the viewpoint of financial analysts and institutional investors.

Institutional investors are surveyed to determine whether disclosures are meeting the needs of these financial statements’ users. The final sample consists of 78 financial analysts who work at stockbrokerage firms and 36 institutional investors who work in Egyptian banks and insurance companies.

The main findings reveal that investors view mandatory and voluntary disclosures differently. Some voluntary disclosures are more useful than mandatory disclosures, which highlights a gap between the regulations and users’ information needs. Moreover, the findings show that respondents consider information related to ownership structure more important than information on risks and firms’ future performance.

This study enriches the scientific debate on the usefulness of disclosures provided in the management report. It might also encourage other researchers to focus on investigating different types of information that may have a significant influence on the decision-making process.

The findings will be useful to regulators to improve the current rules of disclosures. In addition, these results will also be helpful to managers because they highlight the disclosure items that are considered important by users.

This study provides evidence on how users perceive the usefulness of information disclosed in the management reports for their decision-making in an emerging capital market. Even though previous studies investigated the usefulness of management reports, no one of them emphasized the users’ viewpoint.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Washington State school district financial reporting and budget reporting meet the information needs of school board directors charged with governance.

Washington State school board directors were surveyed and asked to rank information items’ usefulness in carrying out their governance role. School district annual reports, budgets and websites were examined to determine whether the identified information was reported and easily transparent to those charged with governance and the public.

Directors rank information on strategic oversight, budget planning and student outcomes as more useful, consistent with the strategic role of new public management. Follow-on analysis of district annual financial reports, budgets and websites reveal that the availability of the information ranked useful by directors is limited. The findings suggest an information gap exists between directors’ information needs and school district reporting. Annual reports and budgets, when provided, often provide typical financial statements and variance data, respectively, rather than reporting on mission-aligned performance measures. The main consequence of the information gap may be compromised decision-making effectiveness.

By directly asking those charged with governance what information they identify as useful and then examining whether the information is reported in the annual report, budget or website, the study links user information needs to information transparency.

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has justified the simplification of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in several ways, but no effective justification for this simplification has been made based on the information needs of users. This study aims to provide empirical evidence of the decision usefulness of IFRS for SMEs from a prominent user group of SME financial statements – the banks.

This study uses a mixed-method approach. First, a survey was conducted on commercial bank lending officers to assess the usefulness of different disclosure items included in the SME financial statements. Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted with commercial bank lending officers to gain an in-depth insight into the appropriateness and economic consequences of the requirements of IFRS for SMEs on their lending decisions.

The findings show that commercial bank lending officers did not consider all the disclosure requirements presented to them to be equally important. Hence, to facilitate the actual needs of the users’ decision usefulness, it is imperative that when given the opportunity, users participate in the development of accounting standards.

The findings of this study will be of interest to accounting regulators for evaluating the successful implementation of IFRS for SMEs and planning the next review of IFRS for SMEs. The IASB and SME Implementation Group are presently considering ways to increase user involvement for the next review of IFRS for SMEs, and the findings of this study signify the need for user involvement in the standard setting process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore preparers’ and users’ perception of intellectual capital (IC) usefulness and to examine the significant differences in the usefulness perceptions of IC information and its categories according to sex, age, function, educational level, specialty and professional experience of respondents.

This exploratory study drew on a questionnaire survey sent to five groups of preparers and users who were asked to provide their usefulness perception about information on IC and its categories.

This paper found that the five preparers and users groups perceive information on IC as well as its three categories as useful for their decision-making purposes. In addition, it concluded that the usefulness perception of IC information does not differ by sex, age, function, educational level and specialty of the respondents, but it differs according to the professional experience.

To the extent that users perceive IC information as useful, managers are encouraged to disclose more information about this hidden capital in order to improve their transparency. As there are no generally accepted IC reporting guidelines and in order to fill informational gaps between companies and their stakeholders, accounting standards bodies could regulate the IC information disclosure by developing relevant communication standards in accordance with stakeholders’ expectations. They may identify information items that should be considered as a priority by making them mandatory for disclosure purposes, and other items voluntary.

The paper can be regarded as the first exploratory study to investigate the IC information usefulness from the perspectives of five preparers and users groups in Tunisia, as an example of a developing economy in Africa.

The purpose of this article is to examine how often urban children in mainland China interact with different types of retail shops, how they learn about new products and services, and their attitudes toward different sources of product information.

A survey of 965 urban children ages six to 13 in four Chinese cities, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai, was conducted in November 2003 to May 2004. Questionnaires were distributed through eight elementary schools and local researchers were appointed to administer the data collection.

The three most popular retail shops among urban Chinese children were bookstores/stationery stores, supermarkets, and restaurants and fast food shops. Store visits and consumption varied greatly with age and gender. Generally speaking, urban children perceived personal sources as useful as, and more credible than commercial sources in obtaining information about new products and services. Older children found commercial sources more useful and credible than younger children. Older children also found more information sources useful than younger children.

Three of the four surveyed cities were highly advanced in terms of economical and advertising development when compared with all other Chinese cities.

A very useful advice for marketers and advertisers to select the right type of retail outlets and media to reach urban Chinese children. Internet and children's print media can be good potential media for promotion.

This paper offers insight to design retail and media strategies to disseminate new product information to urban children in China.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the appropriateness of a general‐purpose financial reporting model derived from a “decision‐useful” framework for government departments.

This research in this paper uses a survey methodology to access users of government department general purpose financial reports and is innovative because it has directly studied actual users across the entire public sector.

The findings of this paper indicate that general‐purpose financial reports are used to satisfy financial accountability and public accountability rather than decision making – indicative of users having an accountability focus rather than a “decision‐useful” focus. This provides systematic empirical evidence against the current financial reporting model used internationally in the public sector.

The paper has important implications for policy makers since the choice of an accounting framework has the capacity to affect the information content of reports – what is reported and how it is measured, and thus have a direct impact on the operations of government. The paper argues that it is crucial that public policy regulators re‐examine the financial reports provided to stakeholders.

The research in this paper is original in that it has, for the first time, systematically reviewed all of the three elements of the public sector general‐purpose financial reporting model as well as directly accessing users. The authors can categorically argue for the abandonment of the model in favour of one, which is better suited to the public sector.

This paper aims to investigate preparers' and users' perceptions on the usefulness of intellectual capital (IC) information disclosed in annual reports of listed companies. In addition, it aims to examine the significant differences in the perceptions of usefulness of IC information and IC categories of the preparers and users.

The paper used a questionnaire survey method to collect the data (i.e. primary data). The questionnaires were distributed to companies (i.e. chief financial officers and accountants) as preparers, and brokers (i.e. analysts) and banks (i.e. credit officers) as users. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics, t‐test and ANOVA.

The paper found that both preparers and users perceive the IC information disclosed in the annual reports of listed companies to be useful for their decision making purposes. Furthermore, the paper found that there are significant differences in the perception of usefulness between preparers and users.

The paper only focused on certain preparers' and users' perceptions. Nevertheless, it provides evidence that IC information is useful for decision‐making purposes. Future research on this issue may include more users.

The findings provide evidence that IC information disclosed by listed companies is perceived to be useful by preparers and users. In addition, it provides evidence that there is significant difference between the perceptions of the usefulness of IC information by preparers, users and amongst the different user groups. Thus, these findings could be useful for regulatory authorities in Malaysia (e.g. Malaysian Accounting Standards Board and Bursa Malaysia) for the improvement of the disclosure practices (e.g. voluntary basis) by the Malaysian listed companies and enhance transparency in the capital market.

The paper can be considered as the first empirical study to examine the usefulness of the IC information from both views; preparers and users in Malaysia. In addition it contributes to the limited literature on IC in Malaysia.