This paper studies how the investors’ attitude towards earnings surprises affects the managers’ incentives to manipulate earnings in an intertemporal context, where the consensus forecast of the analysts is not exogenously given but determined by the strategic interaction between the analysts and the managers. Our analysis shows that given the asymmetric investors’ reaction to earnings surprise...

Current financial reporting guidance allows managers flexibility as to whether to disaggregate income statement items. Such flexibility is problematic if managers prefer to aggregate in some situations and disaggregate in others because we conjecture that investors’ evaluations of firms will predictably differ depending on whether performance information is shown in an aggregated or disaggregat...

This study investigates the stock characteristic preferences of institutional Australian equity managers. In aggregate we find that active managers exhibit preferences for stocks exhibiting high price variance, large market capitalisation, low transaction costs, value-oriented stocks, greater levels of analyst coverage, and some evidence of a preference for stocks with less variability in analy...

OBJECTIVES We tested the effects of providing case managers with tools to assess and respond to client values and preferences on their subsequent knowledge of clients' values and their practices in arranging long-term care. METHOD Using a quasi-experimental design with newly enrolled, cognitively intact clients, we compared case managers, clients, and care plans at the experimental and contro...

We use a laboratory experiment to examine whether and to what extent other-regarding preferences (efficiency, inequality aversion and maximin concerns) of team managers influence their management style in choice under risk. We find that managers who prefer efficiency are more likely to exercise an autocratic management style by ignoring preferences of their team members. Equality concerns have ...

Economic actors have to make lots of decisions, and the paper is based on the premise that it takes time to be involved in any one of them. Attempts to economize on decision-making time imply that groups of peers may abdicate decision-making authority to a small set of managers even though this means that the information and preferences of the uninvolved players are neglected. We find that play...

Escalation of commitment to a failing course of action has been studied in the IT literature, where IT managers are shown to continue committing resources to bad project instead of terminating them. We make a case that escalation of commitment can be considered as the problem of not exercising an option to abandon a project at the correct (optimal) time. The value of a real option is time sensi...