Business Commons^™

A Computational Simulation-Based Framework For Estimating Potential Product Impact During Product Design, Christopher S. Mabey, Andrew G. Armstrong, Christopher A. Mattson, John L. Salmon, Nile W. Hatch, Eric C. Dahlin

Faculty Publications

The impact of engineered products is a topic of concern in society. Product impact may fall under the categories of economic, environmental or social impact, with the last category defined as the effect of a product on the day-to-day life of people. Design teams lack sufficient tools to estimate the social impact of products, and the combined impacts of economic, environmental and social impacts for the products they are designing. This paper aims to provide a framework for the estimation of product impact during product design. To estimate product impact, models of both the product and society are required. This …

Corporate Governance And Tax Avoidance: Evidence From Governance Reform, Jon Kerr, Richard Price, Francisco J. Román, Miles A. Romney

Faculty Publications

Prior literature struggles to find evidence in U.S. settings to support the Desai and Dharmapala (2006) theory on how corporate governance affects tax avoidance. Most studies rely on equity incentive compensation as their governance proxy. We use a Mexican setting to examine this association and find firms with stronger governance engage in less tax avoidance. We rely on both a hand-collected governance index and governance reform to show improved corporate governance pushes tax avoidance toward a new equilibrium. Supplementary analyses show associations between governance and tax avoidance are greatest for tax-cost-sensitive familyowned firms and non-cross-listed firms with naturally weaker governance. …

Disclosure Sentiment: Machine Learning Vs Dictionary Methods, Richard Frankel, Jared Jennings, Joshua A. Lee

Faculty Publications

We compare the ability of dictionary-based and machine-learning methods to capture disclosure sentiment at 10-K filing and conference call dates. Like Loughran and McDonald (2011), we use returns to assess sentiment. We find that measures based on machine learning offer a significant improvement in explanatory power over dictionary-based measures. Specifically, machine-learning measures explain returns at 10-K filing dates, while measures based on the Loughran and McDonald dictionary only explain returns at 10-K filing dates during the time period of their study. Moreover, at conference-call dates, machine-learning methods offer an improvement over the Loughran and McDonald dictionary method of a greater …

Does Visibility Of An Engagement Partner’S Association With Recent Client Restatements Increase Fee Pressures From Non-Restating Clients?, Wuchun Chi, Ling Lei Lisic, Linda A. Myers, Mikhail Pevzner, Timothy Seidel

Faculty Publications

We examine whether engagement partners who have recently been associated with client restatements experience increased audit fee pressures from their non-restating clients. Using data from the United States (U.S.) and Taiwan, we find evidence of lower audit fees among non-restating companies whose audit engagement partner was recently associated with another client’s restatement. These findings are generally strongest when the partner-associated restatement is more prominent or severe, and in the U.S., when non-restating clients are in the same industry as the restating client. Although we find very limited evidence that fee pressures lead to lower quality audits for these partners’ other …

Sibling Relationship Quality In The Context Of Digital Leisure And Geographic Distance For College-Attending Emerging Adults, Eric K. Layland, Jerrica O. Peets, Camilla Hodge, Mikala Glasa

Faculty Publications

During the transition to adulthood, emerging adults may experience new geographic distance separating them from their siblings. Digital leisure is common among emerging adults and may serve as a tool for maintaining relationship quality across geographic distance. Using qualitative data, we created individual digital leisure diversity scores for four categories of digital leisure identified from a constructed taxonomy. The sample included 185 college-attending emerging adults (Mage ¼ 20.1, 64.3% male). Analysis of variance indicated dyadic gender differences in social media and gaming. Digital leisure diversity was associated with greater levels of affective and cognitive sibling relationship quality, regardless of sibling …

Were There Fire Sales In The Rmbs Market?, Craig B. Merrill, Taylor Nadauld, René M. Stulz, Shane M. Sherlun

Faculty Publications

Many observers have argued that the fall in RMBS prices during the crisis was partly caused by fire sales. Using a unique dataset of RMBS transactions for insurance compa- nies, we show evidence supportive of a role, at the transaction level, of forced sales that occurred at discounted prices relative to fundamentals, and find that the RMBS market behaved as a whole as would be expected in the presence of fire sales. We show that risk- sensitive capital requirements and mark-to-market accounting can jointly create incentives for financial institutions subject to adverse capital shocks to sell stressed securities.

Market Predators, Lauren Cohen, Karl B. Diether, Christopher Malloy

Faculty Publications

We find evidence of predatory trading in the corporate bond market. Exploiting novel data on the short selling behavior of institutional investors, we demonstrate that short sellers target those bonds likely to experience the largest negative events in the future: bonds about to be downgraded to junk status, and specifically those held by insurance companies and other institutions that are required to liquidate when bonds fall to junk status. We show that shorting in these bonds predicts large negative returns, which largely reverse over the next year. Short sellers’ trading activity is premeditated: they build up large short positions in …

Crowdfunding Deception Perception: What Makes Would-Be Contributors Perceive Fakeness In Crowdfunding Campaigns?, James Gaskin, Mark J. Keith, Thomas O. Meservy, Nathan W. Twyman, Taylor M. Wells

Faculty Publications

This study illuminates the signals that cause contributors to perceive realness and fakeness in a crowdfunding campaign. A grounded theory approach involving 818 human evaluations of 225 COVID-19-related charitable crowdfunding campaigns identified the validity of the campaign’s stated need, its descriptive detail and writing quality, and having a reputable campaign sponsor as important signals of realness and/or deception, as well as other factors. Commonly used NLP measures have heavy overlap with these reported signals, but by themselves reflect roughly half of the variance explained. Crowdfunding platforms can use this information to help campaign organizers improve public perceptions.

Task Adherence: An Agentic Perspective On Task-Focused Dedication In An Interrupting Work Environment, Tanner Skousen, Justin Ames, James Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Purpose – Knowledge workers live and work in a technology-enabled, push-notification world full of interruptions that create information overload, often requiring these workers to utilize task switching as a mechanism to meet multiple competing tasks’ demands. Previous research has examined both the positive and, more often, negative effects from interruptions and task switching on knowledge workers’ performance. However, this paper aims to examine knowledge workers’ agentic approach to managing interruption signals and consequent task switching to remain dedicated to the task at hand.

Design/methodology/approach – Using an inductive grounded theory approach, we analyzed data from semi-structured interviews with knowledge workers …

The Roles Of Supervisory Support And Involvement In Influencing Scientists’ Job Satisfaction To Ensure The Achievement Of Sdgs In Academic Organizations, Majid Ghasemy, Isabel Maria Rosa-Díaz, James Eric Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Job satisfaction is the focus of this study, given its strategic importance, both to generate differentiation and competitive advantages, and to promote better and more sustainable results in organizations. Guided by the Affective Events Theory (AET), the interest is in analyzing the direct and indirect effects of supervisory support and involvement on job satisfaction and highlighting the implications of the academics’ emotions for sustainability-related policies and practices in academic environments. The context selected is the higher education (HE) sector in Malaysia for science disciplines, due to its socioeconomic relevance and its direct link to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4), as …

Responsible Innovation In Organisations – Unpacking The Effects Of Leader Trustworthiness And Organizational Culture On Employee Creativity, Samuel Ogbeibu, Vijay Pereira, John Burgess, James Gaskin, Jude Emelifeonwu, Shlomo Y. Tarba, Ahmad Arslan

Faculty Publications

Ongoing changes in competitiveness and advancements in technology are challenging the ability of manufacturing firms to bring about responsible innovation in emerging economies. A crucial response to this situation involves supporting employee creativity as a strategy suited to foster responsible innovation. Prior research has established a positive correlation between employee creativity and responsible innovation. However, when attempting to promote employee creativity, firms are often faced with challenges to their organizational culture (OC), especially in the presence of limited employee trust in their leaders. Although, extant research has suggested a positive correlation between leader trustworthiness and employee creativity, little is known …

What Can Mental Health Teach Us About Social Media Screen Time Misestimation?, Mark Keith, Parker Nokes, Alexandra Spruill

Faculty Publications

Mobile platform providers have provided the ability to measure the time consumers spend on each app. This provides the opportunity to measure a consumer’s misestimation of their screentime which is a concept relevant to several mental health attributes such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. We provide additional evidence about the effect of objective screentime on mental health, but add a unique perspective on how screentime misestimation is determined by various mental health attributes. We collected data from a student sample (n=1005) who are from the demographic who most commonly use social media apps (18-29 yr olds). We measured our model …

Experiential Learning Through A Week-Long Information Systems Case Study, Madison Corbin, Cherileigh Leavitt, Degan Kettles, Greg Anderson

Faculty Publications

An experiential learning model known as INTEX (INTegrative EXercise) was implemented by the Information Systems Department at Brigham Young University. The purpose was to facilitate a team-based holistic learning experience in both content and application to supply a means of measuring student performance and further program development. In this paper, we explain how INTEX presents an adoptable experiential learning model, how INTEX is administered, and the extent to which INTEX fulfills each of its seven objectives based on student, alumni, and faculty feedback. Our main findings are: INTEX provides a compelling real-world case simulation, gives students an invaluable teamwork experience, …

Being Satisfied And Serving Communities As Outcomes Of Servant Leadership In The Academic Context: Policies Based On A Multi‑Level Structural Equation Model, Majid Ghasemy, Mahdi Akbarzadeh, James Eric Gaskin

Faculty Publications

There is a great emphasis on the importance of serving communities and the need to study servant leadership in recent higher education literature. Yet, academics’ community citizenship behavior has not been examined through applied research. To address these issues, our study aims at investigating the effects of two dimensions of servant leadership (behaving ethically and helping subordinates grow and succeed) on job satisfaction and community citizenship behavior. The context of our multi-level study is the Malaysian higher education. To estimate our theoretical model, we employed the EQS 6.4 statistical package and analyzed the data collected from 1876 lecturers from 120 …

Rigor, Relevance, And Practical Significance: A Real-Life Journey To Organizational Value, Joseph S. Valacich, Jeffrey L. Jenkins

Faculty Publications

In this essay, we describe a research journey focusing on how to analyze mouse cursor movements, typing fidelity, and data from other human-computer interaction (HCI) devices to better understand the end-user online experience. We begin by defining organizational value and how it relates to other aspects that researchers use to assess academic research quality. We then describe and contrast our research journey by demonstrating key research milestones: from achieving statistical significance to achieving practical significance and, finally, to reaching relevance to practice. We then explain how we crossed the chasm between academic research and technology commercialization (i.e., the last research …

Detecting Noncompliant Behavior In Organizations: How Online Survey Responses And Behaviors Reveal Risk, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Jospeh S. Valacich, Aaron F. Zimbelman, Mark F. Zimbelman

Faculty Publications

Ensuring organizational regulatory and legal compliance is a challenging, high-stakes management task. Overlooking or underestimating noncompliance in organizations can result in substantial fines, damage to a company’s reputation, and, ultimately, loss of business. To help alleviate this risk, we explore whether organizations can assess noncompliance by monitoring users’ answers and related mouse cursor movements in an intelligent online questionnaire. Namely, we propose that noncompliant (compared with compliant) individuals will experience more cognitive dissonance on questions about (1) what constitutes noncompliance behavior and (2) what consequences for noncompliance are appropriate. We predict that increased cognitive dissonance in noncompliant individuals will influence …

An Empirical Analysis Of Video Games And Social Media On Learning In An Information Systems University Class, Heber C. Brau, James C. Brau, James Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Prior research by Brau, et al. (2016, 2017) identifies factors that correlate with university student course grades. We employ the same research structure as the Brau, et al. papers with the innovation of adding dozens of questions that deal with video game and social media usage. Extant research argues that time spent on video gaming and using social media can: 1) hurt student grades, 2) help student grades, or 3) have no impact on student grades. We test the video game and social media impact hypotheses using a survey of over 500 college students in an Introduction to Information Systems …

The Effect Of Help Seeking On Creative Self- Efficacy Of Is Students, Cherileigh Leavitt, Madison Corbin, Mark J. Keith, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Degan Kettles, Greg Anderson

Faculty Publications

Research has demonstrated that student help-seeking behaviors have a variety of positive influences in the classroom. However, the primary outcome of these studies is typically student grades and general self-efficacy. To make a contribution to the IS discipline, we expand this research with a more targeted and specific measure of self-efficacy that was created for IS students: creative self-efficacy (CreaSE) in the IS discipline. This allows us to relate specific help-seeking behaviors to CreaSE sub-constructs which, in turn, allows us to make more targeted recommendations to instructors in IS programs who want to improve the quality and retention of their …

Team Building Through Team Video Games: Randomized Controlled Trial, Mark J. Keith, Douglas L. Dean, James Gaskin, Greg Anderson

Faculty Publications

Background: Organizations of all types require the use of teams. Poor team member engagement costs billions of US dollars annually.

Objective: This study aimed to explain how team building can be accomplished with team video gaming based on a team cohesion model enhanced by team flow theory.

Methods: In this controlled experiment, teams were randomly assigned to a team video gaming treatment or a control treatment. Team productivity was measured during both pretreatment and posttreatment team tasks. After the pretest, teams who were involved in the team video gaming treatment competed against other teams by playing the Halo or Rock …

Evasive Entrepreneurship: Circumventing And Exploiting Institutional Impediments For New Profit Opportunity In An Emerging Market, Nnaoke Ufere, James Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Evasive entrepreneurship (circumvention and exploitation of institutions by entrepreneurs) is a prevalent practice in many developing economies. Extant literature on the topic falls short of providing adequate theories to explain its triggers, mechanisms, and consequences. Leveraging extensive survey data from the World Bank, we used structural equation modeling to examine the relationship between evasive entrepreneurial behavior—tax evasion and bribery—and the relative payoff of such practices. Of the 2599 Nigerian entrepreneurs in our sample, the majority admitted to engaging in evasive entrepreneurship. The data suggest that institutional factors thought to constrain entrepreneurship in emerging markets are counter-intuitively perceived by founders as …

Opportunities For Information Systems Scholars To Help Address Global Crises, James Gaskin, Warren Rosengren

Faculty Publications

As of yet, most applied information systems (IS) research has been concentrated on the problems facing privately owned institutions in developed nations. Now that the IS field has matured and applied research has begun to take a bigger role in the IS community, we have the opportunity to tackle not only traditional information systems problems but also global crises affecting billions of people. There are an abundance of major societal, global, and environmental crises that information systems scholars can help address. In this paper, we review the AIS Senior Scholars’ Basket of Eight (AIS-8) journals to determine their coverage of …

Personal Bankruptcy And The Accumulation Of Shadow Debt, Bronson Argyle, Benjamin Iverson, Taylor Nadauld, Christopher Palmer

Faculty Publications

Compiling new liability-level data from the balance sheets of personal bankruptcy filers, we document that a sizable share of reported liabilities are “shadow debt,” debt not reported to credit bureaus that often arises from the non-payment of goods and services. We use this new data to evaluate how debtor cash flows affect when consumers file for bankruptcy and how much debt they have at bankruptcy. We find that filers respond to a quasi-exogenous $100 increase in monthly cash flows by delaying filing by an average of one month and by increasing unsecured indebtedness by $4,000 in the months preceding filing. …

Who Gets ‘To Guru’? Scientist Ted Speakers And The Role Of Collective Identity In Peer Evaluation Of Audience Diversification, Brian P. Reschke, Taeya M. Howell

Faculty Publications

As producers diversify to additional audiences, they invite scrutiny of themselves and the products they provide, both by external evaluators as well as peer producers. We argue that in certain conditions, audience diversification may suggest producers represent their producer group, prompting special scrutiny by peers. In these cases, peer evaluation of diversification depends on the correspondence between the identity of the diversifying producer and the collective identity of the producer group, such that peers sanction non-prototypical producers and support exemplary producers. We develop and test hypotheses in the context of science, examining how appeals to the general public—giving a TED …

What Is Your Status Portfolio? Higher Status Variance Across Groups Increases Interpersonal Helping But Decreases Intrapersonal Well-Being, Catarina R. Fernandes, Siyu Yu, Taeya M. Howell, Alison Wood Brooks, Gavin J. Kilduff, Nathan C. Pettit

Faculty Publications

Individuals belong to multiple groups across various domains of life, which in aggregate constitute a portfolio of potentially distinct levels of experienced status. We propose a two-factor model for assessing the effects of an individual’s status portfolio, based on status average (mean status level across groups) and status variance (degree to which status varies across those groups). Five studies using samples in general-life and work-specific contexts reveal the importance of both status average and status variance, the latter of which has been largely unexplored by status researchers to date. Individuals experiencing higher status variance show greater perspective taking, which in …

How Do Team Workloads And Team Staffing Affect The Audit? Archival Evidence From U.S. Audits, Brant E. Christensen, Nathan J. Newton, Michael S. Wilkins

Faculty Publications

We use U.S. data from a global accounting firm to investigate how two key elements of audit teams eworkloads and staffing continuity e affect the audit. We find that heavier team workloads are associated with lower audit quality, particularly when team members have lower performance ratings or have total workloads that exceed 60 h per week. In addition to finding evidence of employee burnout, we also document an incremental distraction effect. Specifically, we find that audit quality on the primary client suffers when team members spend more time during busy season on other concurrent clients. Regarding continuity, we find that …

Surrogation Fundamentals: Measurement And Cognition, Paul Black, Thomas Meservy, William B. Tayler, Jeffrey O. Williams

Faculty Publications

Measurement is a fundamental part of accounting. A primary purpose of measurement is to provide more concrete representations of abstract strategic objectives. A potential consequence of using measures to proxy for less-tangible strategic constructs is the tendency for managers to fall prey to surrogation, losing sight of strategic constructs and behaving as though measures are the constructs of interest. We show that surrogation is a nonconscious process. We also extend understanding of the conditions necessary for surrogation to occur by showing that mere awareness of measurement (even absent compensation) is sufficient to induce surrogation. These findings have implications for any …

Do We Matter? The Attention Policy Makers, Academics, And The General Public Give To Accounting Research, F. Greg Burton, Scott L. Summers, T. Jeffrey Wilks, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Many question the value of accounting scholarship to society. We compared the attention the general public, policy makers, and academics give to academic accounting research relative to other business disciplines and other more general disciplines (economics, psychology, and other sciences). The results indicate that accounting research receives significantly less attention from the general public than all other disciplines and also performs relatively poorly in receiving policy makers’ attention compared to both economics and finance. Articles in other disciplines’ elite journals cite relatively little of accounting’s elite-level publications, but non-elite journal articles cite accounting research in similar numbers to other disciplines. …

Prepare For Takeoff: Improving Asset Measurement And Audit Quality With Drone-Enabled Inventory Audit Procedures, Margaret H. Christ, Scott A. Emett, Scott L. Summers, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Auditors increasingly employ technologies to improve audit quality. Using a design science approach, we examine whether using drones and automated counting software can improve audit quality and thereby improve financial reporting. We assess three dimensions of audit quality—efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of audit documentation. We provide evidence that auditors can perform inventory counts with these technologies much more efficiently than they can with manual techniques, decreasing count time in our study from 681 hours to 19 hours. At the same time, auditors can maintain or improve audit effectiveness with these technologies, decreasing error rates in our study from 0.15% to …

New Frontiers For Internal Audit Research, Margaret H. Christ, Marc Eulerich, Ronja Krane, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Internal audit provides useful and valuable services to organizations and research has established its importance in improving corporate governance. However, the body of internal audit research is still small. Further, there are many new and emerging topics for which little is known and practitioners would like guidance. Based on surveys, interviews, and discussions with practitioners, we identify three broad areas for additional research: information technology, staffing and personnel development, and agile auditing. In each area, we describe the current practices and discuss the relevant accounting literature, noting gaps where additional inquiry is needed. We also provide a list of testable …

Internal Audit Stigma Impairs Internal Audit Outcomes, Marc Eulerich, Joleen Kremin, K. Kelli Saunders, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Prior research finds that the internal audit function (IAF) plays a critical role in organizations, yet there is still a stigma toward the profession. We examine how this stigma affects internal audit outcomes, using three different data sources: survey results from parts of Europe and the United States and an experiment. We find that when practicing internal auditors in parts of Europe and the U.S. believe there is a negative stigma about internal auditing, they report negative work outcomes, including less ability to add value, less influence in the organization, more resistance to implementing their recommendations, and more pressure to …