Mr Wong wants to get fit and decides to start running five kilometers a day, but after his first two kilometers, he is exhausted. Clearly the goal was too ambitious. What does he do now? The field of goal setting is of interest to consumer researchers who want to know not only how goals are set but how consumers set about striving towards them. To date, the ... Read More

Motivating employees is a perpetual goal for leaders. While leaders can work to inspire their teams in the hope of improving their effectiveness, there may be other factors getting in the way, such as poor relations among team members. Researchers have tended to look at one or the other outcome, rather than considering how motivating and demotivating factors ... Read More

Shareholder rights theoretically should lower the cost of capital by reducing overinvestment as well as investors' out-of-pocket monitoring costs and idiosyncratic risk. But evidence of these effects as so far has been mixed and somewhat surprising, suggesting that the predictions may not hold. One of the problems, say Kevin C.W. Chen, Zhihong Chen and K.C ... Read More

Cash flows, especially unanticipated ones, raise questions about how firms use these funds. Are they more likely to invest them? Pay dividends? Reduce debts? Do financially constrained firms use them differently from unconstrained firms? These questions are tested in a study by Sudipto Dasgupta, Thomas H. Noe and Zhen Wang that shows cash flows have both ... Read More

Flexibility has become a coveted attribute of organizations, who have been urged to deal with recent fluctuating demands in labor by hiring more "non-standard" workers such as those on temporary contracts. But what happens when standard and non-standard workers work together? Does this have negative or positive implications for the workers and the ... Read More

The mandatory application of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) may help to level the playing field as far as accounting practices are concerned, but the transition to them also offers managers an opportunity to time equity issuance. This was the conclusion of research by Shiheng Wang and Michael Welker that looked at firms in 15 countries ... Read More

Information and communication technology (ICT) is advancing at a rapid pace and the lifecycle of ICT products has shrunk considerably. These products often come in a succession of generations with each new generation surpassing the previous ones in terms of technology dimensions. The Windows OS and iPhone series are good examples. But to consumers, the ... Read More

Growth opportunities constitute an important part of firm value as investors would recognize, but how does investment growth figure in accounting-based valuation? What impact does such growth have on the relationships between equity value, earnings and equity book value? Shengquan Hao, Qinglu Jin (former PhD students from HKUST) and Guochang Zhang examine ... Read More

Team creativity is increasingly seen by companies as a competitive advantage in response to a rapidly-changing marketplace. It is also something that companies can enhance with the right understanding and conditions. Research by Jiing-Lih Farh, Cynthia Lee and Crystal I.C. Farh finds that team creativity can be improved through task conflict so long as the ... Read More

Media publicity can offer firms a seemingly cheap and impactful way to communicate about their goods and services. It has a broad reach, is regarded by consumers with less skepticism than advertisements and, in a sense, is "free" (although U.S. industry spent $19.4 billion on public relations staff in 2008). But to what extent does such publicity affect ... Read More