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There is growing scholarly interest in the use of penalty in employment contracts which reduce employees' pay if the employee's performance does not meet a pre-specified performance threshold. Prior accounting research has focused exclusively on the effect of penalty on employee performance. In this study, the authors extend earlier research by examining how penalty affects the employers' wage offers. Prior research suggests that employers' generous wage offers in employment contracts are normally translated as trust by employees who in turn reciprocate with higher effort. The authors present a theory that predicts penalty reduces employers' wage offers. Then, the authors propose unrestricted communication between employers and employees as a potential moderator for the negative effect of penalty on trust and reciprocity.

The authors implement a controlled lab experiment with a 2 × 3 experimental design (Penalty: Present and Absent; and Communication: None, One-Way and Two-Way).

The authors develop their predictions by utilizing insights from motivational-crowding and organizational communication theories. The authors hypothesize and find evidence that employers' ability to penalize employees can reduce employers' motivation to offer generous wages. As a result, reduced trust demotivates employees to provide high effort. However, the authors find that a two-way communication moderates the negative effect of penalties by restoring trust, thereby, increasing reciprocity. Finally, the authors find evidence that relationship-oriented messages explain the moderating effect of communication.

This study is subject to limitations inherent in all experimental studies. The decisions in the study experiment are less complex than those found in practice. Moreover, there are significantly higher costs and potential benefits to shirk on effort in practice. The authors encourage future research on other organizational features that would influence the generalizability of their theory and results. Nonetheless, this study makes an important contribution to the literature on trust, reciprocity, gift-exchange contracts, managerial controls and communication.

This paper has several important implications for theory and practice. The authors show that the presence of penalty may not automatically result in increasing employees' effort level, contrary to traditional economic theory predictions. This effect is driven mainly by the crowding out effect of a penalty on employers' desire to signal trust. Therefore, the presence of an open communication channel may become an important tool to reverse the psychological effect of reduced trust when penalty is present. Therefore, the study's findings contribute to the trust–reciprocity literature on how management control system influences employers' and employees' behavior. These findings are especially germane given the trend in the workplace toward establishing open communication at different levels within the firm hierarchy. The study also contributes to the literature on trust–reciprocity as critical informal controls and social norms in accounting practices (Bicchieri, 2006; Stevens, 2019), shedding light on how firms may influence employees' reciprocity in management control practices and induce them to act in line with the firm's objectives by opening communication channels.

Prior accounting research document that penalty in employment contracts increases employee performance due to loss aversion. The study, however, demonstrates that the positive effect of penalty is not sustained in a gift-exchange contract. Specifically, the study's experimental results provide evidence that the availability of penalties can psychologically change the way employers perceive their decisions on offering generous wages (i.e. trust) and consequently reduce employees' reciprocation of high effort levels. Yet, the authors propose a two-way communication as a restorative mechanism for the lost trust. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to precisely measure the risk attitudes of Chinese agricultural laborers and then analyze the impact and mechanism of risk attitudes on the entrepreneurial choices of Chinese agricultural laborers.

This paper is based on the theory of expected utility function and utilizes the authoritative China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to accurately measure the risk attitudes of 7,639 Chinese agricultural laborers through experimental methods. In the empirical analysis, this paper employed Probit, IV-Probit and mediation effect models to examine the research hypotheses.

First, agricultural laborers with the lowest risk appetite account for 54.8%, which is 8.69 times the number of agricultural laborers with the highest risk appetite. Second, agricultural laborers preferring risk are more likely to engage in entrepreneurship; this result has been validated through a series of robustness tests. Third, mechanism analysis shows that risk attitude drives the entrepreneurship of Chinese agricultural laborers through improving interpersonal trust, social interaction and formal credit behavior.

Existing research has mainly investigated the impact of risk attitudes on the entrepreneurial choices of the general population, with limited attention paid to agricultural laborers. The potential mechanisms in that process remain unclear, and the measurement results of risk attitude also require further precision. Based on experimental method, this paper not only helps clarify the relationship between risk attitudes and agricultural laborers entrepreneurship in China, but also provides policy recommendations to promote agricultural laborers entrepreneurship and drive rural development.

This paper aims at assessing the impact of a number of behavioral interventions on the willingness of informal businesses, in the Egyptian informal sector, to join the formal sector.

This paper uses an experimental methodology to examine the impact of behavioral interventions on the formalization of the Egyptian informal sector. Specifically, it conducts a survey experiment on a total of 240 informal businesses, operating in the Egyptian informal sector. The primary data collected from the survey experiment is then analyzed using a binary logistic regression to assess the impact of the behavioral primes on the probability of joining the formal market.

The empirical findings of the survey experiment indicate that the biggest obstacle facing informal businesses is finding a formal source of finance that could help them in penetrating the market. Providing informal businesses with information on funding opportunities offered by the ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) significantly increased the probability of joining the formal sector to benefit from this opportunity.

This paper is the first to apply behavioral primes, in the form of informational cues, to the Egyptian case of informal business owners. Previous research on the use of behavioral nudges and primes has focused mainly on the western economies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to making workers more uncompromising with respect to issues such as quality of workplace relations and work-life balance. Hence, motivation and leadership style assume a key relevance for keeping the workforce engaged. We hypothesize that individuals may exhibit different preferences for motivational drivers and for leadership style, and that these two sets of preferences might be correlated with each other and with employees’ personality traits.

Here, we empirically investigate the relationship between leadership style and motivation, by also hypothesizing the possible contribution of personality traits. An online survey was developed and distributed to 150 employees or interns/trainees to collect measures related to their preference for leadership, their motivational drivers, as well as their personality traits. The data were analyzed by means of mediation and moderation analyses to disentangle the three-level relationship existing between these constructs.

Our results suggest that indeed there exists a relationship between preferences for leadership style and motivational drivers. Furthermore, one of these relationships appears to be critically mediated by specific personality traits.

This work is the first, to our knowledge, empirically testing the existence of a three-level relationship between leadership preferences, motivation and personality traits of employees and to contribute to disentangle their reciprocal influences.

This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis on “intertemporal choice” behavior of individuals from journals in the Scopus database between 1957 and 2023. The research covered the data on the said topic since it first originated in the Scopus database and carried out performance analysis and content analysis of papers in the business management and finance disciplines.

Bibliometric analysis, including science mapping and performance analysis, followed by content analysis of the papers of identified clusters, was conducted. Three clusters based on cocitation analysis and six themes (three major and three minor) were identified using the bibliometrix package in R studio. The content analysis of the papers in these clusters and themes have been discussed in this study, along with the thematic evolution of intertemporal choice research over the period of time, paving a way for future research studies.

The review unpacks publication and citation trends of intertemporal choice behavior, the most significant authors, journals and papers along with the major clusters and themes of research based on cocitation and degree of centrality and relevance, respectively, i.e. discounting experiments and intertemporal choice, impulsivity, risk preference, time-inconsistent preference, etc.

Over the past years, the research on “intertemporal choice” has flourished because of the increasing interest of researchers and scholars from different fields and the dynamic and pervasive nature of this topic. The well-developed and scattered body of knowledge on intertemporal choice has led to the need of applying a bibliometric analysis in the intertemporal choice literature.

The field of broad-based employee ownership within corporations is a specific application of the foundational topic of property ownership. It is situated at the intersection of a broad range of scholarly disciplines including economics, law, finance and management. Each discipline contributes vocabulary and distinctions describing this field. That broad spectrum of disciplinary inquiry is a strength but it also lends a “ships passing in the night” quality to discussions of employee ownership. This paper attempts to unravel the narrative diversity surrounding this topic. Four meanings of ownership are introduced. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

There is no experimental design The paper presents a conceptual overview and introduces a taxonomy of four meanings and two models of ownership.

Four meanings of ownership are introduced. The meanings are ownership as compensation, investment, retirement and membership. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

No hypotheses are advanced. This is not a research paper. A conceptual overview that makes use of taxonomy of meanings and models is introduced to help clarify confusions abundant in the field of employee ownership. Readers may differ with the categories of meanings and models introduced in this conceptual overview.

The ambition of the paper is to describe the various meanings and models of employee ownership presently in use in both academic and applied settings. It is not necessary or desirable to assert the primacy of a single meaning or model in order to achieve progress. The analysis provided here surfaces a range of assumptions about ownership that have heretofore been implicit in both scholarship and in practice. Making those assumptions explicit should prove useful to both scholars and practitioners of employee ownership.

The concept of employee ownership enjoys a relatively broad appeal with the public. Among the academic disciplines that have trained their lights upon it, a more mixed reception prevails. Much of the academic and policy controversy derives from confusion about the nature and structure of employee ownership. This paper attempts to address that confusion by presenting a taxonomy of meanings and models that may prove useful for future research.

This study is one of the first efforts to comprehinsively map the various meanings and models of broad-based employee ownership.

This study analyzes the role of cooperative behavior in facing the risk of encouraging innovative agricultural production projects by small-scale farmers in the context of farmers in developing countries.

A within-subjects field experiment was conducted with small-scale Colombian panela cane farmers. The authors used the collected data to run the regression analyses.

The results suggest that when small farmers can follow cooperative behavior by joining a group and pooling resources to face risk, they are more willing to invest in a novel and profitable alternative, albeit riskier. However, the possibility of cooperating with a group to invest in a novel production project depends on its expected risk level.

These results will help develop agricultural policies for sustainable development. Establishing informal networks for small-scale farmers to deal with unpredictable risks may aid in developing innovative systems.

Agriculture is highly vulnerable to climatic impacts, which, combined with the inherent risk of innovation, may reduce small farmers' willingness to adopt innovation. Cooperation appears to be a mechanism for pooling resources and facing risk.

Research has focused on experimentally testing the effect of cooperative behavior when facing risk. The authors contribute to the literature by demonstrating the impact of the ability of small-scale farmers in rural areas to collectively manage risk on investment in innovative projects.

There is emerging evidence in the accounting literature that investors react negatively to corporate greenwashing. But does that hold for all investors, or do different types of investors react differently? This paper aims to study retail investors’ responses to media reports on corporate greenwashing and how these responses depend upon the investors’ social value orientation. The authors argue that media reporting on corporate greenwashing negatively affects the rationale for allocating funds to firms engaging in greenwashing. The authors also expect this reaction to be stronger for prosocial investors compared to proself investors.

The authors conduct an online experiment with 229 participants representing retail investors in the German-speaking countries.

The results show that retail investors who received media reports on deceptive disclosure invest more funds in the company that does not engage in greenwashing (and less in the firm that engages in greenwashing) than investors who did not receive these reports. The authors’ results provide novel evidence that this effect primarily holds for investors with a prosocial value orientation. Finally, the authors’ data show that lower trust in the firm that engages in greenwashing partially mediates the effect of media reports on investor choices.

The authors provide unique evidence how different types of investors react to media reports on greenwashing. The authors find that moral motives, rather than risk-return considerations, drive investor responses to greenwashing. Overall, these findings support the important function of the media as an intermediary in stock market participation and highlight the pivotal role of individual traits in investors’ responses to greenwashing.

Doctoral programs play a crucial role in promoting innovation and technology transfer in universities. To design these programs effectively and with a co-design perspective, it is essential to consider all stakeholders involved in the process, including teachers, students and employers. The main objective of this study is to enhance postgraduate programs to improve students' employability.

This empirical study was conducted over a three-year period and employed semi-structured interviews as its primary research methodology. In the first phase, 21 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers from various sectors. The second phase involved 20 interviews, and the final phase of the study included 18 interviews with the same managers from previous phases.

The study's main results revealed that the international networks, language proficiency and analytical skills of doctoral students were highly valued by employers. The main findings come from companies with doctoral students. Therefore, the skills were identified during the learning experience of the PhD graduates in the companies.

The study's results can guide improvements in postgraduate program curricula and design to enhance students' employability.

This research presents a novel approach to its findings. On the one hand, the study's conclusions may provide valuable insights for business agents, encouraging them to hire PhD students. On the other hand, it aims to drive necessary changes that promote more PhD students' focus on non-academic careers, creating significant value for research and innovation in the private sector.

The goal of this study is to investigate the mediating effect of referral rewards on consumer willingness to recommend poverty-alleviating products and to identify the most effective referral rewards for incentivizing consumers to recommend poverty-alleviating products.

Tournament rewards and piece-rate rewards are designed based on the theory of indebtedness, the related literature and the actual background. SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 17.0 are used to analyze the structural equation model.

According to the structural equation analysis, the following findings were found: under the tournament reward condition, social image, feelings of indebtedness and perceived reward value negatively affect consumer willingness to recommend. Under the piece-rate reward condition, social image and feelings of indebtedness significantly negatively affect consumer recommendation willingness, while perceived reward value significantly positively affects consumer recommendation willingness. The mean recommendation willingness of the tournament reward group is significantly lower than that of the control group. In contrast, the mean recommendation willingness of the piece-rate rewards group is significantly higher than that of the control group.

Based on the study findings, the authors propose that enterprises apply piece-rate rewards to incentivize consumers to recommend poverty-alleviating products when designing such rewards. In this way, the sale of poverty-alleviating products can be improved.