PURPOSE: In this study, we investigated the commitment of cultural minorities and majorities in organizations. We examined how contextual factors, such as pressure to conform and leadership styles, affect the commitment of minority and majority members. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: A field study was conducted on 107 employees in a large multinational corporation. FINDINGS: We hypothesize and found that cultural minorities felt more committed to the organization than majority members, thereby challenging the existing theoretical view that cultural minorities will feel less committed. We also found that organizational pressure to conform and effective leadership increased the commitment of minorities. IMPLICATIONS: Our findings indicate that organizational leaders and researchers should not only focus on increasing and maintaining the commitment of minority members, but should also consider how majority members react to cultural socialization and integration processes. The commitment of minority members can be further enhanced by effective leadership. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: In this study, we challenge the existing theoretical view based on similarity attraction theory and relational demography theory, that cultural minorities would feel less committed to the organization. Past research has mainly focused on minority groups, thereby ignoring the reaction of the majority to socialization processes. In this study, we show that cultural minorities can be more committed than majority members in organizations. Therefore, the perceptions of cultural majority members of socialization processes should also be considered in research on cultural diversity and acculturation.

Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural products. As a result, social influence is often presented in a negative light. Here, we show the benefits of social influence for cultural markets. We present a policy that uses product quality, appeal, position bias and social influence to maximize expected profits in the market. Our computational experiments show that our profit-maximizing policy leverages social influence to produce significant performance benefits for the market, while our theoretical analysis proves that our policy outperforms in expectation any policy not displaying social signals. Our results contrast with earlier work which focused on showing the unpredictability and inequalities created by social influence. Not only do we show for the first time that, under our policy, dynamically showing consumers positive social signals increases the expected profit of the seller in cultural markets. We also show that, in reasonable settings, our profit-maximizing policy does not introduce significant unpredictability and identifies "blockbusters". Overall, these results shed new light on the nature of social influence and how it can be leveraged for the benefits of the market.

Reporting requirements, targets, and quotas have been implemented in several countries to increase female representation in leadership. In three studies, we analyze the effectiveness of these strategies from a goal-setting perspective. Study 1 evaluates the relationship between reporting requirements and female representation on boards of directors with data from Fortune 500 companies from 1996 to 2015. Study 2 analyzes the association of reporting requirements, targets, and quotas with the representation of women on boards of directors of public companies across 91 countries. Study 3 evaluates the impact of targets and quotas for women in parliaments across 190 nations. The board diversity reporting directive introduced in the US was followed by an acceleration in the increase of female representation on boards of directors of Fortune 500 companies. Higher goals for women on boards of directors were related to higher female representation. Similarly, higher gender goals and strong enforcement mechanisms in parliaments were related to higher female representation.

This paper studies panel data models with unobserved group factor structures. The group membership of each unit and the number of groups are left unspecified. We estimate the model by minimizing the sum of least squared errors with a shrinkage penalty. The number of explanatory variables can be large. The regressions coefficients can be homogeneous or group specific. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator are established. We also introduce new C -type criteria for selecting the number of groups, the numbers of group-specific common factors and relevant regressors. Monte Carlo results show that the proposed method works well. We apply the method to the study of US mutual fund returns and to the study of individual stock returns of the China mainland stock markets. p

The practices and norms of public budgeting have often been seen as a brake on the flexibility needed of government organisations. This remains true despite historically significant financial management reforms designed around budgetary devolution. Seeing flexibility as operating along two dimensions – devolution and discretion – this paper revisits the underlying features of traditional public budgeting to develop a taxonomy of six generic ‘budget rules’. By isolating key properties of budget control, the paper uses two of the more prominent rules – annuality and purpose – to illustrate how the rules interact to generate control capacity, as well as the scope for rule variability in promoting increased flexibility.

We propose a model of interdependent scheduling games in which each player controls a set of services that they schedule independently. A player is free to schedule his own services at any time; however, each of these services only begins to accrue reward for the player when all predecessor services, which may or may not be controlled by the same player, have been activated. This model, where players have interdependent services, is motivated by the problems faced in planning and coordinating large-scale infrastructures, e.g., restoring electricity and gas to residents after a natural disaster or providing medical care in a crisis when different agencies are responsible for the delivery of staff, equipment, and medicine. We undertake a game-theoretic analysis of this setting and in particular consider the issues of welfare maximization, computing best responses, Nash dynamics, and existence and computation of Nash equilibria.

We study dynamic trial-offer markets, in which participants first try a product and later decide whether to purchase it or not. In these markets, social influence and position biases have a greater effect on the decisions taken in the sampling stage than those in the buying stage. We consider a myopic policy that maximizes the market efficiency for each incoming participant, taking into account the inherent quality of products, position biases, and social influence. We prove that this myopic policy is optimal and predictable asymptotically.

Since the global financial crisis (GFC), financial institutions and practitioners in Australia, New Zealand and Asia have come under scrutiny for a range of ethical transgressions leading to industry scandal, as have their more well-known counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom. Some scandals were caused by people who – driven by greed and the demands of a complex, fast-paced industry – chose to behave unethically. However, evidence from social psychology points to an alternative explanation: a good deal of unethical behaviour is also unconscious. In A Question of Ethics, we draw on themes and findings from various industry scandals to examine contributing factors at the structural, social and individual levels that influence ethical conduct, and how these may be distorted by what social psychologists refer to as cognitive biases. We present data from a six-country survey of banking and financial services industry practitioners, which explores attitudes towards questionable practices and seeks views about the potential for ethical improvement.