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In order to be successful, micro‐enterprise owners in South Africa face several management challenges. To overcome these challenges it is crucial that they possess sufficient financial management skills to ensure business survival and growth. This article focuses on determining the extent to which the critical financial management skills that micro‐enterprise owners in South Africa require differ from those they possess, in order to identify specific interventions to develop the skills that are lacking. It was found that most micro‐enterprise owners do not possess the critical financial management skills required. Recommendations are made on how members of the accounting profession could become involved in developing these skills.

This study aims to explore the existence and strength of power through focussing on the manner in which accountants exercise power in their advisory relationship with small business.

Interviews provided insights into accountants’ power-related perceptions, experiences and use of power in the advisory relationship. A questionnaire accessed evidence from small business owner-managers (SBOMs). Power theoretical perspectives informed the analysis of the findings.

Accountants’ expert and information power is a consequence of SBOMs’ dependence on their accountants’ expertise and knowledge. Accountants construct advisor roles and exercise power in a manner indicating that they attempt to manage rather than exploit power imbalances to the detriment of dependent SBOMs. However, outbreaks of frustration and conflict in the relationship illustrate the difficulties in managing the dysfunctional consequences of power imbalances.

While the findings are restricted to the Australian accountant–small business advisory relationship, they offer a basis for research into the effect of power on the relationship in other national contexts. Research which includes the views of managers of failed small businesses would also extend this work.

The study’s focus on accountants’ experiences can assist practitioners endeavouring to develop advisory relationships with small business and designers of professional development programmes seeking to optimise the value of the advisory relationship.

The paper extends the study of power to the under-researched yet important accountant–small business advisory area. Its findings are of interest to accountants and accounting policymakers who envisage a broadening of accountants’ small business advisory role.

This paper compares how women leaders in four US industries–higher education, faith-based non-profits, healthcare and law–experience 15 aspects of gender bias.

This study used convergent mixed methods to collect data from 1,606 participants. It included quantitative assessment of a validated gender bias scale and qualitative content analysis of open-ended responses.

Results suggest that, while gender bias is prevalent in all four industries, differences exist. Participants in higher education experienced fewer aspects of gender bias than the other three industries related to male culture, exclusion, self-limited aspirations, lack of sponsorship and lack of acknowledgement. The faith-based sample reported the highest level of two-person career structure but the lowest levels of queen bee syndrome, workplace harassment and salary inequality. Healthcare tended towards the middle, reporting higher scores than one industry and lower than another while participants working in law experienced more gender bias than the other three industries pertaining to exclusion and workplace harassment. Healthcare and law were the two industries with the most similar experiences of bias.

This research contributes to human resource management (HRM) literature by advancing understanding of how 15 different gender bias variables manifest differently for women leaders in various industry contexts and by providing HRM leaders with practical steps to create equitable organizational cultures.

Motivation significantly influences learning and memory. While a long history of research has focused on simple forms of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning, recent research is beginning to characterize how motivation influences episodic memory. In this chapter we synthesize findings across behavioral, cognitive, and educational neuroscience to characterize motivation’s influence on memory. We provide evidence that neural systems underlying motivation, namely the mesolimbic dopamine system, interact with and facilitate activity within systems underlying episodic memory, centered on the medial temporal lobes. We focus on two mechanisms of episodic memory enhancement: encoding and consolidation. Together, the reviewed research supports an adaptive model of memory in which an individual’s motivational state (i.e., learning under states of reward or punishment) shapes the nature of memory representations in service of future goals. The impact of motivation on learning and memory, therefore, has very clear implications for and applications to educational settings.

Due to climate change and an increasing concentration of the world’s population in vulnerable areas, how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly is still a universal dilemma.

This paper applies a law and economic approach.

China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risk is in many ways unique. It emphasizes government responsibilities and works well in many respects, especially in disaster emergency relief. Nonetheless, China’s mechanism which has the vestige of a centrally planned economy needs reform.

I propose a catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework which marries the merits of both the market and government to manage catastrophe risks. There are three pillars of the framework: (i) sustaining a strong and capable government; (ii) government enhancement of the market, neither supplanting nor retarding it; (iii) legalizing the relationship between government and market to prevent government from undermining well-functioning market operations. A catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework may provide insights for developing catastrophe insurance in China and other transitional nations.

First, this paper analyzes China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risks and China’s approach which emphasizes government responsibilities will shed light on solving how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly. Second, this paper starts a broader discussion about government stimulation of developing catastrophe insurance and this framework can stimulate attention to solve the universal dilemma.

This experiment analyzes multi-offer versions of the signaling and screening litigation games, as well as a bilateral multi-offer litigation game. A plaintiff has either a low or a high claim on an uninformed defendant, and the two negotiate in an attempt to reach a pre-trial settlement. Trial is costly, and settlement generates surplus over which the two parties can bargain. In the signaling game, the defendant has the power to make the offer, while the plaintiff makes the offer in the screening game. Previous experiments on single-offer games find that disputes occur even when offers contain surplus not predicted under the theory, and fairness appears to be important in explaining deviations from theory. This research examines whether renegotiation in the form of successive sequential offers can yield efficiency gains via lower dispute rates. There are four main findings. One, under the one-sided multi-offer structure the excess dispute rate is 23 percentage-points lower in the screening game, and the high-offer dispute rate is 31 percentage-points lower in signaling game. The bilateral game yields an additional 15 percentage-point reduction in the high-offer dispute rate, but excess disputes persist. Two, in these games, proposers take advantage of the multi-offer opportunity and make around three to four offers per negotiation. Three, across games the surplus in a fair offer remains constant at about one-sixth of the surplus, but the empirical benchmark from which this is measured varies according to which player has the power to make the offer. In the one-sided games, the benchmark is the respective zero-surplus endpoint, but in the bilateral game the benchmark is the surplus midpoint. Fourth, dynamic behavior plays an important but complex role in observed outcomes. Multi-offer mechanisms may be alternatives to costly information transmission mechanisms like disclosure or discovery.

Culture is a central concept broadly studied in social anthropology and sociology. It has been gaining increasing attention in economics, appearing in research on labor market discrimination, identity, gender, and social preferences. Most experimental economics research on culture studies cross-national or cross-ethnic differences in economic behavior. In contrast, we explain laboratory behavior using two cultural dimensions adopted from a prominent general cultural framework in contemporary social anthropology: group commitment and grid control. Groupness measures the extent to which individual identity is incorporated into group or collective identity; gridness measures the extent to which social and political prescriptions intrinsically influence individual behavior. Grid-group characteristics are measured for each individual using selected items from the World Values Survey. We hypothesize that these attributes allow us to systematically predict behavior in a way that discriminates among multiple forms of social preferences using a simple, parsimonious deductive model. The theoretical predictions are further tested in the economics laboratory by applying them to the dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. We find that these predictions are confirmed overall for most experimental games, although the strength of empirical support varies across games. We conclude that grid-group cultural theory is a viable predictor of people’s economic behavior, then discuss potential limitations of the current approach and ways to improve it.

In this chapter, the integrative methodological approach (IMA) of the research project GLOWA Elbe is introduced, which represents a scientific methodology to support water management under uncertainty regarding future paths of global change. The approach paves the way for integration of research work of many disciplines, of different assessment methods, of various policy fields, and the involvement of relevant stakeholders and decision makers. IMA can be roughly described by four research elements (scenario derivation, indicator and criteria identification, model-based impact analysis, and final scenario assessment based on combined benefit–cost and multi-criteria analysis), which lay the basis for the IMA activities of the global change research sequence. Its practical application is demonstrated by a case study on the Spree and Schwarze Elster river basins. Specific results of Chapter 4 (on scenario derivation) and Chapter 11 (on integrating economic evaluation into water management simulation) in this volume are picked up in order to focus on the illustration of the integrated assessment results for this German case study.