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The purpose of this study is to elaborate on how schemers build and maintain trust essential for financial fraud that persists over many years. A Ponzi scheme is a form of financial fraud that involves repeated interaction with an increasingly large number of individuals over a long period time. This type of fraud involves the building and maintenance of each individual’s trust. All Ponzi schemes come to a dramatic conclusion. Either the schemer defaults on payments, or someone gets suspicious and the scheme is uncovered. Understanding how schemers build and maintain trust may help prevent or uncover the fraud earlier, limiting financial devastation endured by unsuspecting investors, as well as externalities inflicted on the financial system as investors lose trust.

This study combines an understanding of trust accumulation from multiple disciplines in the existing literature to build a comprehensive model of trust creation and maintenance in Ponzi schemes.

This study finds that key characteristics of both the trustor and trustee contribute to long term financial arrangements. Schemers prey on individuals with specific characteristics that indicate they are more trusting. Trusting individuals are less likely to conduct due diligence to detect fraud. Prevention and detection of fraud are made more difficult by convincing, yet false, mimicry used by schemers to signal trustworthiness.

Bringing together multiple views on trust allows creation of a comprehensive model of trust that captures key characteristics of unsuspecting investors and schemers who prey on them in financial fraud.

Purpose – This paper reflects on how does the mode, in which we ask questions, affect the responses? It explores the differences between the responses to the same questions obtained through two different modes – depth interviews and self-administered questionnaires (SAQs).

Approach – This paper is based on a series of serendipitous but enlightening insights that were obtained while conducting research that sought to examine the drivers of corporate environmentalism in firms based in Eastern and Western economies. The methodology adopted in the research project involved conducting depth interviews with senior-most managers in business organizations in India (Eastern) and New Zealand (Western). The insights that form the basis for this paper were gained when some managers treated the list of questions in the interview guide as a structured open-ended questionnaire and sent back detailed written responses.

Findings – This paper reports that the written responses obtained through SAQs in this project were different both in form and content; they were staid, reserved, clichéd and aimed at being politically correct. In contrast the responses to the same question asked in the interviews were open and candid admissions. Interview responses stood up to the triangulation tests, while the written responses did not. These differences were particularly evident in the eastern context.

Research implications – While both SAQs and interviews are prone to social desirability bias, this paper suggests that there is a greater opportunity to reduce social desirability bias in interviews. This is especially true if a trained interviewer can convince the participants of the credibility, importance and legitimacy of the study.

Originality/value – This paper contributes in two important ways:1.It addresses the issue of how responses to the same question differ across SAQs and depth interviews in strategy and management research.2.It also examines whether this effect differs across Eastern and Western organizational contexts.

This chapter focuses on women's descriptions of their own violence in nineteenth-century Ireland, as revealed in prisoner petitions held in the National Archives of Ireland. It uses the case files of women imprisoned or sentenced to death for violent crimes such as infanticide, manslaughter, murder, wounding and assault. This chapter takes an empirical approach and considers the ways that women explained and rationalised their violent acts. An analysis of the petitions offers an insight into women's views of their own violence, gendered attitudes at the time, and women's sense of the factors that might lead to a commutation of sentence. The accuracy or truthfulness of the petitions is not important in this study; instead, the chapter explores the self-image that women wanted to portray and the tactics that they opted to use to seek a reduction in their sentences. As shown in this chapter, most women emphasised their passivity: they typically claimed to be innocent, coerced or provoked into violence.

Gambling has been a part of the human experience for a long time, perhaps as long as humans have interacted socially. Its literature has been accumulating since ancient times, with references found in some of the earliest records. Throughout history gambling has had a bad reputation because of the multitude of social problems attributed to it. The gambling industry today refers to the activity as “gaming,” which does not sound quite as notorious.