Analysing the risks of individual and collective intentionality

The risk assessment of complex systems often seems to neglect the way in which intentions, collective and individual, are central to our explanations of how risk arises in such systems. Contradictions among the intentions of different actors, for example, are typically an important part of our understanding of how organizations break down. Moreover, risk assessment practice pays little attention to the reflexive problem of how intentions for the risk assessment itself can themselves become problematic. This study was an attempt to develop a framework to support reasoning about intentionality, both individual and collective, during risk assessment. The framework broadly follows a process of 1) identifying the main social objects in a system, 2) asking what are the collective intentions for these objects in terms of the functions that are conferred on them, 3) asking what obligations and powers these create, and 4) asking what risks of organizational dysfunction can then arise. The approach was applied in a case study of aviation ramp operations. Its main value is as a formative rather than a summative kind of analysis.     

Is Your Banker Leaking Your Personal Information? The Roles of Ethics and Individual-Level Cultural Characteristics in Predicting Organizational Computer Abuse

Computer abuse (CA) by employees is a critical concern for managers. Misuse of an organization’s information assets leads to costly damage to an organization’s reputation, decreases in sales, and impositions of fines. We use this opportunity to introduce and expand the theoretic framework proffered by Thong and Yap (1998) to better understand the factors that lead individuals to commit CA in organizations. The study uses a survey of 449 respondents from the banking, financial, and insurance industries. Our results indicate that individuals who adhere to a formalist ethical perspective are significantly less likely to engage in CA activities than those following a utilitarian ethical framework. In addition, the results provide evidence that employees with individualistic natures are linked to increased CA incidents, whereas collectivist tendencies are associated with decreases in CA behaviors. Our results also show that collectivism acts as a strong moderator that further decreases the relationships between formalism and CA, and utilitarianism and CA. Finally, we offer detailed suggestions on how organizations and researchers can leverage our findings to decrease CA occurrences.     

Filtration enlargement-based time series forecast in view of insider trading

This survey reviews filtration enlargement models in view of insider trading. Although filtration enlargement aptly models insiders' informational advantage, the theoretical results have not attracted the attention of the empiricists, owing mainly to the lack of a bridge transforming the results to testable hypotheses, and/or the absence of econometrics method linking the hypotheses and the data. This survey provides a feasible avenue to estimate insider information and to detect trading from a relatively sophisticated theoretical model, where the dynamics of publicly available data (e.g., stock price) implies insider information before the information is completely digested. We complete the survey with an empirical illustration based on simulated data.