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Information technology is associated with psychological and physical risks such as high stress levels and antisocial behavior. The purpose of this paper is to understand why people engage in technology risk behavior, despite the negative consequences that might follow. Focusing on online games, this study identifies factors that affect individuals' intention to play online games and investigate whether the effects of these factors differ across different risk levels.

Experimental design was used as the research methodology. Subjects were randomly assigned to a single treatment with two conditions: high and low risk scenarios. A total of 597 responses were analyzed to test the research hypotheses.

The research findings reveal that subjective norms, curiosity and playfulness have a positive effect on the intention to play online games, while critical mass has no effect on the intention decisions. Further, among the three significant constructs, playfulness turned out to be the only factor that is affected by risk levels.

This study extends prior literature on technology adoption by examining the effect of different risk levels on adoption intention decisions. It further extends prior literature on online games by identifying the factors that drive individuals to play games while accounting for the risks associated with playing these games.

The research study identifies factors that should be taken into consideration when promoting the adoption of technologies, including online games.

This study offers a new understanding of technology adoption decisions that takes into account the different levels of risk associated with technology use. It shows that an individual's curiosity and the pressure emanating from one's social network are powerful behavior drivers that persist regardless of the level of risk. Further, this research study is among the first to apply categorical least squares methodology combined with a procedure for a moderated structural equation model to test a structural equation model with categorical multiplicative terms in LISREL.

Mobile device users are frequently faced with a decision to allow access to their personal information that resides on their devices in order to install mobile applications (apps) and use their features. This paper examines the impact of satisfaction on the intention to allow access to personal information. The paper achieves this by acknowledging the affective and cognitive components of satisfaction derived from affect heuristic and privacy calculus theories, respectively.

Survey data was collected from mobile device users who download and install mobile apps on their devices. Overall, 489 responses were collected and analyzed using LISREL 8.80.

The findings suggest that personal information disclosure decision is mainly a matter of being satisfied with the mobile app or not. We show that perceived benefits are more critical than perceived risks in determining satisfaction, and that perceived benefits influence intention to allow access to personal information indirectly through satisfaction.

This study offers a more nuanced analysis of the influence of satisfaction by examining the role of its two components: the cognitive (represented in perceived benefits and perceived risks) and the affective (represented in affect). We show that information disclosure decision is a complicated process that combines both rational and emotional elements.

Amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, higher education institutions (HEI) all over the world have transitioned to online teaching. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of technostress and negative emotional dissonance on online teaching exhaustion and teaching staff productivity.

Survey methodology was used to collect data from faculty members in Jordanian universities. A total of 217 responses were analyzed to test the research model.

The research findings reveal that technostress creators have various impact on online teaching exhaustion and teaching staff productivity. Negative emotional dissonance has positive impact on both online teaching exhaustion and teaching staff productivity. Further, online teaching exhaustion is negatively associated with teaching staff productivity.

This research extends prior literature on technostress by examining the phenomenon in abnormal conditions (during a crisis). It further integrates technostress theory with emotional dissonance theory to better understand the impact of technostress creators on individual teaching staff productivity while catering for the interactional nature of teaching which is captured through emotional dissonance theory.

The research offers valuable insights for HEI and policymakers on how to support teaching staff and identifies strategies that should facilitate a smooth delivery of online education.

Unlike prior research that have examined technostress under normal operational conditions, this research examines the impact of technostress during a crisis. This study shows that technostress creators vary in their impact. Moreover, this study integrates technostress theory with emotional dissonance theory. While technostress theory captures the impact of technostress creators on individual teaching staff productivity, emotional dissonance theory captures the dynamic nature of the teaching process that involves interactions among teachers and students.

As service organizations move toward the open system strategic customer orientation, they need to ensure consistency among competitive methods, performance measures and strategies utilized. This paper aims to examine the relationships among these important facets of today’s service organizations. The study at hand examines the relationship among competitive methods, implicit strategy and performance measures used by Portuguese service organizations.

This research uses a survey-based methodology. Factor analysis, cluster analysis and regression analysis procedures are used to analyze the collected data from Portuguese service organizations.

Based on the results of this study, it appears that some of the studied service organizations are steadily moving toward the open system mode of strategy, competitive methods and performance measurement. However, the majority of the service organizations examined appeared to be in a state of strategic confusion, as they appear to lack the consistency among competitive methods, performance measures and desired strategic orientations.

The sample used in this study is specific in nature, as it includes only Portuguese service organizations. Therefore, the results of this study should be interpreted with caution. Future research in other cultural service settings is recommended. Such research should emphasize the exploration of theoretical frameworks, which tend to practically integrate competitive methods, performance measures and strategic orientation.

This study has direct practical implications for service managers, as they attempt to integrate their organizational systems. As such, the research in this study paves the way toward the practical integration and consistency among competitive methods, performance measures and strategic orientations needed to enhance the customer orientation. In this context, such integration and consistency are essential to enhance the strategic competitiveness of today’s service organizations operating in a dynamic marketplace.

This research combines bodies of knowledge dealing with competitive methods, performance measures and their impact on strategic orientations. The conceptual framework offered in this research attempts to facilitate the understanding for consistent practice pertaining to the competitiveness of the open system service organization in a dynamic environment. Such consistency is essential to the competitiveness of the organization in a dynamic environment.

Muslims' commitment to religious learning and its institutions speaks of a genuine interest in a lifestyle characterized by education and wisdom, spiritual and religious well-being, in addition to sustainable intellectual and socio-cultural conditions of their communities. At the core of these critical contributions however, lays the question of the interplay between religious learning and community building, and the means according to which religious learning is continually the driving force for development and prosperity. This study aims to examine a number of questions pertaining to the character of Islamic religious learning while exploring the problems impeding religious learning from the effective development of the community. Specifically, this research draws on the perspectives of two prominent Muslim scholars, ‘Abdul Rahman Ibn Khaldun and Mohammad Tahir Ben Achour in an attempt to further understand the dilemmas impairing the position of Islamic religious learning in relation to the general context of Muslim communities. This inquiry opens new fields of critical inquiry on the role of religious learning today and brings to light some of the issues causing declining influence on the effective development of Muslim communities.

Examination of Islamic sources to develop conceptual framework on the issue of religious learning and community.

Ingraining the mind with varying degrees of information on a particular Islamic subject or mastery of a particular textbook without challenging students' minds with on-going problems and challenges, emerging ideas or trends, or growing emotions and behaviors; only causes memorized lessons to creep into stagnancy and inertia, thus shifting attention to the form and shape of learning as opposed to its essence and implications for community change and development. This calls for a systematic review of Islamic religious learning in such a way that it draws essentially from the primary sources of Islamic thinking while drawing learners closer to the folds of piety and moral discipline, embracing social change as a validating parameter for effective learning, while continually building active bridges with the surrounding community.

Research relied on original Islamic sources including works of Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Achour.

Motivated by the agency theory, this paper primarily intends to empirically investigate the impact of board attributes on corporate cash holdings and how the mentioned nexus is moderated by the level of corporate political connections in a developing country, namely, Palestine during the period of 2011–2018.

Multiple regression analysis on a panel data was employed. Moreover, the authors applied three different approaches of static panel data “pooled OLS, fixed effect and random effect”. Fixed-effects estimator was selected as the optimal and most appropriate model. In addition, to control for the potential endogeneity problem and to profoundly analyze the study data, the authors perform the one-step system generalized method of moment estimator.

The results of this study provide support for the agency theory ideology, which considers that sturdy and well-established corporate governance (CG) paradigms minify the magnitude of cash held by companies. Furthermore, the findings distinctly unveil that the impact of board attributes is more positive under a high level of political connections.

This study was solely restricted to one institutional context “Palestine”; therefore, the results reflect the attributes of the Palestinian business environment. In this vein, it is possible to generate different findings in other countries, particularly in developed markets.

The findings of this study can draw responsible parties, top management and policymakers' attention in developing countries to introduce and contextualize new mechanisms that can lead to better managing of corporate cash holdings.

Empirical evidence on the moderating role of political connection on the effect of board attributes on corporate cash holdings something that was predominantly neglected by the earlier research and has not yet examined by ancestors. Hence, to protrude nuanced understanding of this novel idea, this study minutely bridges this research gap and contributes practically and theoretically to the existing CG–cash holdings literature.

This study aims to explore whether an auditee’s audit quality influences its payout policies (i.e. each form of dividend payouts and stock repurchase payouts).

Based on a panel data of US public firms, from 2004 to 2018, and Tobit estimators, this study aims to examine whether auditees’ audit quality is related to their payouts and under which circumstances (from the standpoints of auditees’ information asymmetry, refinancing risk, corporate governance and financial constraints) the aforesaid associations are more pronounced.

The findings of this study imply that auditees’ audit quality is positively related to auditees’ payouts. Further examination suggests that this positive relationship is stronger for auditees with higher information asymmetry, lower financial constraints and refinancing risk and for those with weaker governance. Finally, this study documents that dividend payouts are more stable for auditees with high-quality audits than those with low-quality audits. The results support the view that auditees’ transparency (reflected in high-quality audits) could be a crucial driver and rationale for their payout policies and, ultimately, overall policies.

By combining two different research lines of audit quality and corporate payout policies, this paper adds to both literature, as it is a novel one to document the contributing function and impact of audit quality on auditee’s payout policies (tangible financial decisions and policies). The findings are significant considering that it documents high-quality audits affecting the auditees besides their financial reporting quality. This study also shows the moderating roles of the auditee’s information asymmetry, rollover risk, financial constraints and corporate governance in the relation between audit quality and an auditee’s payout decisions. Furthermore, the findings can help shareholders (aiding them in determining companies with high payout policies), regulators and policymakers who emphasize audit quality. The results indicate that policymakers’ and standard setters’ efforts fostering high-quality audits should be in conjunction with firm payout standards.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of governance mechanisms on corporate failure.

This study used a hypothesis-testing research design to collect data from the annual reports of 35 companies listed on Palestine Exchange from 2010 to 2019. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed, along with correlation analysis to evaluate linear relationships between variables. The variance inflation factor was used to test multicollinearity, and binary logistic regression was utilized to develop the research model.

There is a significant positive relationship between board of directors' independency, institutional ownership and the quality of external audit, and corporate failure reduction. No significant relationship has been found among corporate governance variables such as board size, board meetings' frequency, board members' remuneration and audit committee existence, and corporate failure reduction.

Several empirical research studies have developed models to predict corporate failure using accounting and financial data. However, limited research has empirically investigated the impact of the different mechanisms of governance on corporate failure prediction.

The research highlighted the significance of companies' commitment to governance principles and their impact on predicting failure. The study suggests that decision-makers and managers can adopt different governance mechanisms to support corporate success and avoid those that may lead to negative consequences and failure.

This research is the first in Palestine to use a comprehensive list of corporate governance mechanisms to predict the failure of companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange between 2010 and 2019.

This study explores whether a firm's environmental and social (E&S) transparency affects corporate payout policies having two forms of dividend payout and stock repurchase payout.

Focusing on a large sample of S&P 500 firms, and utilizing Tobit estimators, the author examines whether a firm's environmental transparency and social transparency affect the levels of each dividend payout and stock repurchase payout. Transparency reflects comprehensive scores compiled by Bloomberg, capturing both the quantity (in terms of the number of data points) and the quality (with respect to objective and industry-relevant data points) of verified E&S information attributed to a firm's E&S practices.

The findings demonstrate that transparency, both environmental and social, relates to higher corporate payouts (i.e. higher dividend payout and higher stock repurchase payout). These positive relationships are magnified for firms suffering from high information asymmetry, low financial reporting quality and for those with weak governance. Moreover, the author finds that dividend payout is more stable in high E&S transparent firms than in low E&S transparent firms. The study findings continue to hold after a battery of robustness and sensitivity checks such as alternative measures, specifications, estimators, use of the instrumental variable regression approach and mitigation of omitted variable bias

The study findings suggest that investors' interests (demanding for high corporate payouts) and other stakeholders' interests (demanding for high E&S transparency) are not necessarily in conflict, and investors' demands can be met while maintaining commitment to high E&S transparency. In addition, the study results imply that higher E&S transparency complements higher corporate payouts and signals to the market both a firm's commitment to E&S transparency and its ability to have high corporate payouts. In this line, the study findings clarify the high value of E&S transparency screening in investors' decision-making process as such transparency leads to higher corporate payouts for investors (i.e. facilitating wealth transfer to shareholders). Finally, the study findings are relevant to standard setters and regulators who emphasize the importance of E&S transparency.

By integrating two distinct streams of literature on corporate finance and corporate social responsibility (CSR), the author introduces E&S transparency as a novel nonfinancial driver of corporate payout policies. Finally, the study findings are in line with the notion that firm transparency (reflected in E&S transparency) can be a crucial element in justifying a firm's corporate payout policies and, in an overall view, firm policies.

This study aims to investigate the Ramadan effect anomaly on the stock markets’ indices and estimate the movement of these indices in the light of the phenomenon.

Stock market indices are used as financial indicators to show the Ramadan effect. To validate this effect, eight Arab countries, which comprises Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Egypt, are adopted. A linear regression with R², error, F-value and p-value is considered to analyze and understand the effect of Ramadan on the aforementioned Arab countries.

Results found that Ramadan has a strong effect on estimating and predicting the performance of stock market indices in all studied Arab countries, except Kuwait. Results found that the majority of the Ramadan effect occurred after the second 10 days of Ramadan, where the direction of stock indices is opposite of Ramadan variables in all aforementioned cases.

This study is considered as an enrichment of the existing literature review with regard to the Ramadan effect. The study presents a new methodology that can be followed to improve the predictions of stock market indices by using a weight least square method with linear regression. This study presents the most affected periods of time that could decrease or increase the stock prices. Finally, the study proves the capability of the weight least square method in building a predictive model that takes the date into consideration in predicting stock market indices.