Cue usage in financial statement fraud risk assessments: effects of technical knowledge and decision aid use

This paper investigates the effects of technical knowledge and decision aid use on financial statement fraud risk assessments made by directors and students. More extreme fraud risk assessments are made when participants identify and process larger (smaller) numbers of diagnostic (non‐diagnostic) factors, with technical knowledge driving diagnostic factor identification. Significant decision aid‐technical knowledge effects are also found; decision aid use has a detrimental effect on high‐knowledge directors while improving performance in inexperienced, low‐knowledge students. These results suggest that although decision aids can afford gains in performance in inexperienced users, they can have unintended and/or paradoxical behavioural effects on experienced users.     

Transplanting Social Capital to the Online World: Insights from Two Experimental Studies

The recent proliferation of computer networks has stimulated the emergence of thousands of online communities. Facebook, which has grown to 175-million users in five years and recently surpassed megasite MySpace to become the world's largest social networking site, is a classic example. As the importance of online communities continues to grow, a good understanding of their success factors for building and sustaining a community becomes crucial.

In this article, we apply social capital theories to examine the interactions among individuals and trust building at the initial development of an online community. Specifically, we postulate that offline social capital can be transplanted into an online community (small or large) to foster the development of trust and social norms that make a community thrive. We conduct two experimental studies: one in the context of real-world, small-scale online communities, and the other in the context of computer-simulated large-scale online communities. Results from these studies provide strong support for our proposition. We interpret these results and discuss their implications and contributions to theory and practice.     

Managing political imperatives in war time: strategic responses of Philips in Australia, 1939–1945

The Australian subsidiary of Dutch multi-national enterprise Philips came under secret service surveillance and faced risk of government takeover as enemy property during World War II. It was also excluded from Australian government contracts for war-related communications equipment at a time when it was forced to reduce civilian production. These threats to its assets and operations required the firm to develop an adaptive corporate strategy in order to respond to the political imperatives it faced; not just minimising political risk, but also taking advantage of the opportunities that war-related production offered during the war years and after.     

Cost-effectiveness of omalizumab add-on to standard-of-care therapy in patients with uncontrolled severe allergic asthma in a Brazilian healthcare setting

Objective: Omalizumab add-on to standard-of-care therapy has proven to be efficacious in severe asthma patients for whom exacerbations cannot be controlled otherwise. Moreover, evidence from different healthcare settings suggests reduced healthcare resource utilization with omalizumab. Based on these findings, this study aimed to assess the cost-effectiveness of the addition of omalizumab to standard-of-care therapy in patients with uncontrolled severe allergic asthma in a Brazilian healthcare setting.

Methods: A previously published Markov model was adapted using Brazil-specific unit costs to compare the costs and outcomes of the addition of omalizumab to standard-of-care therapy vs standard-of-care therapy alone. Model inputs were largely based on the eXpeRience study. Costs and health outcomes were calculated for lifetime-years and were annually discounted at 5%. Both one-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were performed.

Results: An additional cost of R$280,400 for 5.20 additional quality-adjusted life-years was estimated with the addition of omalizumab to standard-of-care therapy, resulting in an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of R$53,890. One-way sensitivity analysis indicated that discount rates, standard-of-care therapy exacerbation rates, and exacerbation-related mortality rates had the largest impact on incremental cost-effectiveness ratios.

Limitations: Assumptions of lifetime treatment adherence and rate of future exacerbations, independent of previous events, might affect the findings. The lack of Brazilian patients in the eXpeRience study may affect the findings, although sample size and baseline characteristics suggest that the modeled population closely resembles Brazilian severe allergic asthma patients.

Conclusion: Results indicate that omalizumab as an add-on therapy is more cost-effective than standard-of-care therapy alone for Brazilian patients with uncontrolled severe allergic asthma, based on the World Health Organization’s cost-effectiveness threshold of up to 3-times the gross domestic product.     

The biological standard of living and body height in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, 1770–2000

How did the biological standard of living develop in Indonesia during colonial times? Did it increase substantially after decolonization? In our study, we use four sets of anthropometric data to construct time series of average human height since the 1770s. The paper observes a significant decline in heights in the 1870s, followed by only modest recovery during the next three decades, both of which are related to a sequence of disasters. Average heights increased from the 1900s and accelerated after World War II. The World Economic Crisis, the Japanese occupation and the war of independence in the 1930s and 1940s constituted a difficult period. Average height growth thereafter is related to improvements in food supply and the disease environment, particularly hygiene and medical care.     

Manufacture upgrade and interfirm relationship development: the case of electronics firms in the Pearl River Delta

Despite significant economic benefits of manufacture upgrade from original equipment manufacturing, through to original design manufacturing to own brand manufacturing, research on interfirm relationship development during the process of manufacture upgrade has remained underdeveloped. This article examines different types of interfirm relationships and their impact on manufacture upgrade using case studies of electronics firms located in the Pearl River Delta. The findings suggest that three iterative processes support relationship development: resource seeking, learning and networking. These processes influence relationship development for both vertical and horizontal relations through trust-based personal relationships. In particular, the insights provided by relational view of interfirm relationships appear to complement and support economic goals of governance mechanisms.