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Over the past two years, fraudulent financial reporting has become a major concern of both the Securities and Exchange Commission and investors. These concerns have been spurred by evidence that several high-profile companies such as Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and HealthSouth have published false and/or misleading financial reports. Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 82 specifies that auditors have a responsibility to assess the likelihood of management fraud and identifies specific risk factors that should be considered when making that assessment. Apostolou et al. (2001b) examined how internal and external auditors rate the relative importance of these factors. This study extends Apostolou et al. (2001b) by examining how forensic experts at four Big 5 professional service firms assess the factors specified in SAS No. 82. These assessments produced two different models of relative importance: (a) a statistical model (produced by the Analytic Hierarchy Process); and (b) a subjective model (based on subjects’ assessment of the relative weights). These models are then used to assess the self-insight of and the degree of agreement among the forensic experts. The results indicate that forensic experts have a moderately high degree of self-insight. A moderate to high degree of consensus among experts’ judgments about the relative importance of fraud risk factors was noted.

This study explores how balanced scorecard format and reputation from environmental performances interact to influence performance evaluations.

Two general options exist for inserting environmental measures into a scorecard: embedded among the four traditional perspectives or grouped in a fifth perspective. Prior balanced scorecard research also assumes negative past environmental performances. In such settings, and when low management communication levels exist on the importance of environmental strategic objectives (a common practitioner scenario), environmental measures receive less decision weight when they are grouped in a fifth scorecard perspective. However, a positive environmental reputation would generate loss aversion concerns with reputation, leading to more decision weight given to environmental measures. Participants (N=138) evaluated performances with scorecards in an experimental design that manipulates scorecard format (four, five-perspectives) and past environmental performance operationalizing reputation (positive, negative).

The environmental reputation valence’s impact is more (less) pronounced when environmental measures are grouped (embedded) in a fifth perspective (among the four traditional perspectives), when the environmental feature of the measures is more (less) salient.

Findings provide the literature with original empirical results that support the popular, but often anecdotal, position of advocating a fifth perspective for environmental measures to help emphasize and promote environmental stewardship within an entity when common low management communication levels exist. Specifically, when positive past environmental performances exist, entities may choose to group environmental performance measures together in a fifth scorecard perspective without risking those measures receiving the discounted decision weight indicated in prior studies.

We examine the earnings management implications of using nonfinancial performance measures (NFPM) in executive compensation contracts. We argue and test that when a manager's compensation is based on financial and NFPM, he/she has less incentive to manipulate earnings to maximize compensation. Using panel data covering the period 1992–2005, we compare earnings management behavior for a sample of firms that used both financial and nonfinancial measures to a matched sample of firms that based their performance measurement solely on financial measures. The results are mainly consistent with a reduction in earnings management behavior for those firms that rely on NFPM in their compensation contracts.

We take Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) seriously by rigorously estimating structural models using the full set of CPT parameters. Much of the literature only estimates a subset of CPT parameters, or more simply assumes CPT parameter values from prior studies. Our data are from laboratory experiments with undergraduate students and MBA students facing substantial real incentives and losses. We also estimate structural models from Expected Utility Theory (EUT), Dual Theory (DT), Rank-Dependent Utility (RDU), and Disappointment Aversion (DA) for comparison. Our major finding is that a majority of individuals in our sample locally asset integrate. That is, they see a loss frame for what it is, a frame, and behave as if they evaluate the net payment rather than the gross loss when one is presented to them. This finding is devastating to the direct application of CPT to these data for those subjects. Support for CPT is greater when losses are covered out of an earned endowment rather than house money, but RDU is still the best single characterization of individual and pooled choices. Defenders of the CPT model claim, correctly, that the CPT model exists “because the data says it should.” In other words, the CPT model was borne from a wide range of stylized facts culled from parts of the cognitive psychology literature. If one is to take the CPT model seriously and rigorously then it needs to do a much better job of explaining the data than we see here.

The thin feminine body ideal in Western society has persisted, despite becoming less representative of the female population, with obesity rates consistently rising since the 1980s. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated obesity rates, due to curtailed interventions, restricted mobility/enforced physical inactivity and increased reliance on processed food with a longer shelf life due to social isolation (World Obesity Foundation, n.d.). Individuals with obesity report weight discrimination in a broad range of settings, including employment, where researchers have documented weight discrimination in relation to hiring, job assignment, promotion, remuneration and work stability. Weight discrimination may be worse for jobs involving public interaction, particularly for women, because heavier women do not conform to societal body ideals, leading to weight stigmatisation such as anti-fat attitudes and beliefs (e.g. negative stereotypes) and prejudice. This chapter presents a systematic literature review of studies that have examined weight discrimination against women with obesity in jobs involving public interaction, i.e. ‘customer-facing roles’.

Purpose: To understand how lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and asexual (LBTQA+) young women interpret the social construction of “lesbian obesity” in the context of their lived experiences and membership in the LGBTQ+ community.

Methodology: Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 25 LBTQA+ women, ages 18–24, to explore how participants perceive and experience dominant discourses about gender, sexuality, and weight. Interviews were analyzed using a combination of deductive and inductive coding approaches.

Findings: Participants resisted public health discourse that frames obesity as a disease and the implication that their sexual identities put their health at risk. Many participants viewed their sexual identities and membership in the LGBTQ+ community as protective factors for their health statuses in general and their body image in particular.

Implications: Our findings suggest a need to reconsider the utility of the concept of “lesbian obesity” to characterize the significance of elevated rates of overweight and obesity in this population. Public health and clinical interventions guided by body positive approaches may be of greater relevance for sexual minority women.

Originality: This study centers the perceptions and experiences of LBTQA+ young women in order to examine how the intersections of sexual minority identity, dominant cultural ideals about weight, and obesity discourse inform their health.

This study examines weight loss surgery patients’ experiences with vanity stigma. First, the research explores if and how vanity stigma occurrences differ for female and male surgery patients. Second, the research interrogates the role of this stigma in shaping patients’ feelings about their bodies.

The data stems from qualitative interviews (n = 44) and surveys (n = 55) with pre-operative and post-operative weight loss surgery patients. The author used narrative interview analysis to inductively identify and analyze prevalent themes.

Participants’ stigma experiences are differentiated by gender. Approximately half of female participants reported perceiving vanity stigma. Women who faced negative accusations were likely to distance themselves from such claims by citing personal disinterest in their bodies, whereas women who did not perceive vanity accusations were likely to express approval and pleasure in their post-weight loss bodies. Men, in contrast, were not accused of vanity. Men frequently characterized their post-surgical, post-weight loss bodies as having utilitarian value.

The study concludes that gender norms play a role in shaping bariatric surgery patients’ experiences with vanity stigma and body-related feelings. Limitations include the small number (n = 9) of male participants and the lack of a representative sampling frame for bariatric surgery patients.

Previous studies have not explored how gender shapes bariatric surgery patients’ experiences with appearance-related social scrutiny. This chapter adds to existing research on gendered body norms and reveals gendered dimensions of vanity stigma.

Purpose: As biomedicine grants technology and quantification privileged roles in our cultural constructions of health, media and technology play an increasingly important role in mediating our everyday experiences of our bodies and may contribute to the reproduction of gendered norms.

Design: This study draws from a broad variety of disciplines to contextualize and interpret contemporary trends in self-quantification, focusing on metrics for health and fitness. I will also draw from psychology and feminist scholarship on objectification and body-surveillance.

Findings: I interpret body-tracking tools as biomedical technologies of self-surveillance that facilitate and encourage control of human bodies, while solidifying demands for standardization around neoliberal values of enhancement and optimization. I also argue that body-tracking devices reinforce and normalize the scrutiny of human bodies in ways that may reproduce and advance longstanding gender disparities in detriment of women.

Implications: A responsible conceptualization, design, implementation, and usage of health-tracking technologies requires us to recognize and better understand how technologies with widely touted benefits also have the potential to reinforce and extend inequalities, alter subjective experiences and produce damaging outcomes, especially among certain groups. I conclude by proposing some alternatives for devising technologies or encouraging practices that are sensitive to these differences and acknowledge the validity of alternative values.