The Impact of Better‐than‐Average Bias and Relative Performance Pay on Performance Outcome Satisfaction

Drawing on equity and expectancy theories, we hypothesize that the perception of accountants about their ability to contribute relative to a peer (operationalized as the better‐than‐average [BTA] bias) negatively influences their satisfaction with the outcomes of the performance evaluation process (operationalized as performance outcome satisfaction [POS]). We hypothesize further that this negative influence is mitigated by the amount of relative performance pay. We test these hypotheses using data collected from a survey of and an experiment involving 164 entry‐level accountants. We found that in general our participants rated themselves better than the average audit professional and their immediate work associate; that is, they displayed a BTA bias. Moreover, we found that both the BTA bias and performance pay individually influenced POS; we also found a moderately significant interaction effect. In their entirety, the results indicate that the greater an entry‐level accountant believes that she or he is better than average the more likely her or his performance outcome satisfaction will fall.     

Living under value chains: The new distributive contract and arguments about unequal bargaining power

In the 1980s and 1990s, during the high-water mark of Washington Consensus development, rural sociologists and geographers critical of contract farming described contract as a legal fiction—one that imagines formally equal and voluntary relations between large firms and small farmers and hence that functions purposefully to obscure unequal social relations. Today, however, development planners, who argue for contract farming as an integral part of value chain agriculture, describe unequal bargaining power as a problem for rural development to solve. Our article analyzes how proponents have domesticated what was once a radical critique of contract farming—a phenomenon that we suggest tells of value chain development more broadly. Via a qualitative case study of India, we describe how a range of actors—development planners, state officials, and farmers—now all make arguments about unequal bargaining power and yet hold disparate understandings of what bargaining inequalities mean and what reforms should therefore follow. More specifically, we show how and why common reform proposals—for contract regulation and farmer aggregation—remain constrained by the inequalities they would challenge and thus why farmers themselves speak different possibilities to the problem of unequal bargaining power.     

Equal-weighting and value-weighting: which one is better?

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Prior research shows that noisy prices can introduce biases in returns causing equal-weighted portfolios to outperform value-weighted portfolios. In...     

Moral leadership and investor attention: An empirical assessment of the potus’s tweets on firms’ market returns

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Drawing upon investor attention and moral leadership theories, we examine the impact of President Trump’s tweets on firms’ market...     

Exploring usage of mobile banking apps in the UAE: a categorical regression analysis

The banking sector has seen major changes with advances in technology. Electronic financial transactions are gradually taking over traditional banking services in terms of transferring funds, utility payments, insurance premium, mortgages and even stock trading. Despite the widespread popularity of smartphones and the advantages of mobile banking, the adoption rates of the mobile apps have been very low all over the world. Our study explored the consumer acceptance of mobile apps in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by using a structured online questionnaire that was designed using standard variables from the Technology Acceptance Model. Principal component analysis was used to identify and score these factors for the subsequent categorical regression analysis. Consumers were assigned numerical categories depending on their level of usage of the app, and the CATREG nonlinear technique was used to determine the significance of technology acceptance factors. The results show that almost two-thirds of the sample were currently using Mobile Banking apps, and they predominantly belonged to the 30–40 age-group. Perceived usefulness and available information were identified as the main factors influencing acceptance and level of usage of mobile banking apps. This study makes a significant contribution to the existing literature by identifying consumers according to their level of usage and adopting the categorical regression model, which has not been attempted earlier. The results provide important insights for banking professionals in the UAE, in terms of marketing initiatives, information technology and customer service.