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Although there has been a good deal of prior research on differences between Asian (i.e., Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea) and American business practices, few studies have dealt with comparisons of approaches to decision making in the various cultures. This paper addresses how levels of openness, conflicting advice, centralized control, and disagreement across different countries may affect decision making. It may be that the “common wisdom” which suggests Japanese decision making exclusively involves cooperation ignores the existence of conflict in Japanese decisions. In fact, Japanese decision makers may be more open, resolve conflict prior to reaching consensus, and exert less centralized control than decision makers in the U.S. and Hong Kong. This could help explain their abilities to make effective business decisions in Japan.

Why do people so often make bad investment decisions – when it should have been clear from the beginning the decisions would turn sour? Using the John DeLorean case as an example, this article explores some of the natural human tendencies that adversely affect the quality of decision making. Investors, once they are aware of these biases, can take steps to counteract their influence and make more well‐informed decisions.

“Statistical decision theory is a theory of decision‐making, i.e., of selecting among alternatives. It is not a theory of problem solving, i.e., of finding the cause of a particular set of symptoms. Thus, if the problem or opportunity is defined poorly even the best analysis thereafter will be of limited value. In fact, it could be detrimental”.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

If we want to improve managerial cognition, we need to capture the full spectrum of cognitive functions and the complex processes through which they unfold. I propose two very different methods (one older and low-tech, one newer and high-tech) that allow us to observe cognitive functions and processes directly in real time.

Reports on the first year of the Italian ARTIS initiative designed as a “club” for managers in key sectors of the economy to share innovative knowledge in the strategic management field. ARTIS meetings (four in the year 1991‐92) involve interdisciplinary presentations, integration of ideas through work sessions and integration of interventions.

This paper examined the relationships between national culture and strategic behavior in the banking industry in Jordan and U.S. The study first developed a strategic posture and secondly a cultural profile for the top management of the research domain. The strategic posture suggested the readiness for strategic response from managers. The degree of readiness was correlated with the constructed cultural profile of the managers and financial performance of the banks. The study found significant relationships between certain national cultural strategic characteristics, (risk propensity, time orientation, and openness to change, uncertainty avoidance and managerial perception of control over the environment) strategic behavior and financial performance.

This study explores the whistleblowing judgments and intentions of accounting students utilizing scenarios involving accounting earning’s manipulations and fraud. Individual differences affect how one makes decisions yet are rarely explored in the whistleblowing literature. As such, the authors conducted an exploratory study to determine if one’s cognitive style (the method a person uses to perceive incoming information and how they make decisions) affects whistleblowing judgment and intent. Using multivariate regression, the authors find that cognitive style significantly affects moral sensitivity, whistleblowing judgment, and whistleblowing intent. This chapter makes several important contributions to the existing literature. This is the first study that explores whether cognitive style affects moral sensitivity, whistleblowing judgments, and whistleblowing intentions. Second, it demonstrates that the models which exclude individual differences may be incomplete.

Policy-capturing is an experimental technique potentially capable of providing powerful insights into the cognitive bases of work-related decision processes by revealing actors’ “implicit” models of the problem at hand, thereby opening up the “black box” of managerial and organizational cognition. This chapter considers the strengths and weaknesses of policy-capturing vis-à-vis alternative approaches that seek to capture, in varying ways, the inner workings of people’s minds as they make decisions. It then outlines the critical issues that need to be addressed when designing policy-capturing studies and offers practical advice to would-be users concerning some of the common pitfalls of the technique and ways of avoiding them.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of four cognitive biases, namely, selective perception, exposure to limited alternatives, adjustment and anchoring, and illusion of control in anticipating and responding to Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.

The paper is based on exploratory case study research and secondary data on decision making in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in regards to planning and managing DDoS attacks on Census day in 2016.

Cognitive biases limited the ABS’s awareness of the eCensus system’s vulnerabilities, preparation for and management of DDoS attacks. Cyberattacks are on the increase, and managers should expect and be prepared to deal with them.

Due to the sensitivity of the topic, it was not possible to interview relevant stakeholders. Analysis is based on high-quality secondary data that includes comprehensive government reports investigating the events on Census day.

Cyberattacks are inevitable and not an aberration. A checklist of actions is identified to help organisations avoid the failures revealed in the case study. Managers need to increase their awareness of cyberattacks, develop clear processes for dealing with them and increase the robustness of their decision-making processes relating to cybersecurity.

This the authors believe that it is the first major study of the DDoS attacks on the Australian census. DDoS is a security reality of the twenty-first century and this case study illustrates the significance of cognitive biases and their impact on developing effective decisions and conducting regular risk assessments in managing cyberattacks.