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Online investment platforms offer an environment that may lead some traders into excessive behaviors akin to gambling. Over the last decade, gambling behaviors associated with the stock market have attracted the attention of many researchers but the literature on the subject remains scarce. This study aims to present the results of live interviews with a sample (N = 100) of retail investors trading online, and contrasts trading habits with gambling behaviors.

Participants are divided in three groups according to their score on an adapted version of the Problem Gambling Severity Index (referred to as the PGSI-Trading), and their trading habits and behaviors are compared.

The authors find that traders with higher PGSI-Trading scores are more likely to display gambling-related behaviors such as trading within a short timeframe, being motivated by making money quickly and experiencing high sensations when trading.

The sample is small but the authors proceeded this way in order to gather some qualitative data that would be helpful to clinicians in the Province of Quebec. The questionnaire used to classify traders at risk of being gamblers (PGSI-Trading) has not been validated.

The findings of this study will be helpful to clinicians who hwork with patients suffering from excessive online stock trading habits.

Clinicians observe an increasing number of patients who consult with excessive stock trading habits. This study has brought new information allowing clinicians to better understand how gambling manifests itself on the stock market.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the trading habits of individuals classified in terms of their score on an adapted PGSI questionnaire.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a risk-based framework to estimate the option value of infrastructure investment, accounting for the stochastic behavior of both financial and physical (engineering) variables.

This study uses a real-options approach and computes the optimal investment dates and option values using Least Squares Monte Carlo, both the original Longstaff – Schwartz algorithm and the constrained Least Squares approach of Le tourneau – Stentoft.

Real-option value for infrastructure investment is substantial. It is beneficial to model jointly financial and engineering risks to better understand the timing and real-option value of infrastructure investment. The analysis further shows which variables are option value drivers.

Future work could integrate financing constraints into the model, consider path dependency in the physical state variables or integrate sovereign risk, expropriation risk, operational risk or other project risks.

Financial practitioners and investment managers interested in infrastructure risk finance or project finance will benefit from a novel framework to analyze infrastructure investments in which engineering and financial risks interact in a tractable way.

Public decision-makers will benefit from a better understanding of what determines the value of infrastructure investments, how real-option value affects optimal investment timing and how both are determined by financial and engineering risks.

The analysis considers financial and engineering risks in a single framework to better understand option value in infrastructure investment. The framework and findings are useful both to risk finance and project finance practitioners and investors as well as engineers and public sector decision-makers.

We define diffusion as the spread of something within a social system. Diffusion is the most general and abstract term, and it embraces such processes as contagion, mimicry, social learning, organized dissemination, etc. (Strang & Soule, 1998). While the home territory of diffusion is innovation (see Rogers, 2003 for an authoritative review), more recent macro-diffusion research has developed, based on social movement and institutionalization arguments (Ansari, Fiss, & Zajac, 2010; Wejnert, 2002).

This paper aims to draw on current research in public policy, and more specifically about a collaborative design process for a poor suburban community in São Paulo, Brazil and its relation to social cybernetics as the “science of effective organization.” The research project in public policy, online‐communities, has been financed by the state‐sponsored agency FAPESP since 2003, and involves four research groups from the Architecture and Computer Science Departments at the University of São Paulo, and various public and non‐governmental organizations under the coordination of Nomads.usp Research Center (Center for Studies on Interactive Living, www.eesc.usp.br/nomads).

The design methodology includes three premises: an organization of the team which considers multidisciplinary and multicultural aspects; the involvement of potential users as creators of the virtual community and of its concrete space; and the concern that the process will be organized so that autonomy and evolution take place.

Special interest in the comparison of architectural methods and cybernetics is to understand how information and communication are dealt with using a design process to promote active exchange of knowledge and competences, and to improve interaction and conversation in a local context of large social differences, affected by lack of opportunities and regulating structures.

Owing to its constant questioning of viability, adaptability and recursion, cybernetics should be able to make the designer team constantly revise the proposal to change conditions during its process of implementation and later autonomy.

The paper discusses the actual relevance of the use of the cybernetic theory as a way to improve information and communication between designers and the population in poor communities.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between a positive leadership style [i.e. authentic leadership (AL)] and nurses’ psychological health (i.e. nurses’ flourishing and satisfaction with work–family balance), including psychological capital (PsyCap) as a mediational variable.

A cross-sectional study was conducted with a self-report questionnaire including 1,076 nurses from public and private hospitals in France.

Structural equation modeling results revealed that AL is related to nurses’ flourishing and satisfaction with work–family balance and that PsyCap acted as a partial mediator between this leadership style and positive outcomes.

This research indicated that hospitals can enhance nurses’ psychological health not only in their work but also in their lives in general by improving leaders’ authentic management style and developing PsyCap (e.g. staffing, training and development).

An original feature of this paper concerns its focus on the mediating role of PsyCap in the relationship between AL and these positive outcomes. Moreover, this study underlined the influence of leadership style on nurses’ psychological health beyond occupational health. The research makes a valuable contribution to the existing AL literature by establishing a new explanatory model of AL and nurses’ psychological health in the French context. It also highlights the interest in developing this leadership style in health-care settings.

The present chapter aims to provide a holistic perspective by investigating how passion types can have a role on entrepreneurs’ target of passion with the integration of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. A conceptual framework was administered in order to build the association between passion types and targets of passion in the light of the literature by which harmonious and obsessive passions are proposed to be the determinants of different targets of entrepreneurs’ passion. Additionally, based on the extant literature, the role of culture in shaping the entrepreneurs’ target of passion is addressed by utilizing Hofstede’s cultural approach. Seven major propositions were discussed to provide a comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurial passion and targets of passion.

This chapter attempts to offer a clearer look at the historical roots of the founding of mutualist finance. Without denying that the various forms of financial mutualism may have legal and organizational roots in ancient times, the author considers what, for contemporary mutualist banks, may constitute the soul.

In its first part, the document presents the individual constructions that existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in a context in which economic development and the industrial revolution banished the rules and standards of the former society. It refers to Utopian socialisms as opposed to the scientific solutions proposed for a new social organization and to the new solidarism according to Léon Bourgeois. Christian sources are also called to mind with social Christianity (Protestant) and social Catholicism until the birth of the social doctrine of the Church.

This frenzy of ideas as well as the confrontation with reality led to the birth, in Germany, of the first experiments with alternative finance. This is the subject of the second part of this chapter, which then develops the bank mutualism created by the founding fathers, F.W. Raiffeisen and H. Schulze-Delitzsch.

The historical description of the creation of mutualist banks brings up two major problems when talking about the “other finance”: the interest and activity of the bank. Is an ethical finance capable of proposing a credible alternative? This is a question that needs to be answered in the light of history.

This chapter attempts, more than 150 years after the fact, to demonstrate the ponderous presence of the question and the permanence of the founding ideas in order to comprehend the facts and propose ideas for analysis and construction of an “other finance.”

There is increasing interest in understanding negative consumer reactions to brands and the nature of negative brand perceptions. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the construct of brand hypocrisy from a consumer perspective and develop a scale to measure it.

A multiphase scale development process involving 559 consumers was conducted. Study 1 pertains to item generation and reduction phases. Study 2 reports on scale purification and validation through confirmatory factor analyses and model comparisons. Study 3 focuses on discriminant and predictive validity, while Study 4 further investigates predictive validity using real brands with differences in brand hypocrisy.

A 12-item scale measuring four dimensions of brand hypocrisy is developed: image hypocrisy (brand failing to put words into action), mission hypocrisy (brand exerting an unacknowledged negative impact on society or consumer well-being), message hypocrisy (brand conveying unrealistic or unattainable images) and social hypocrisy (brand supporting social responsibility initiatives for strategic purposes only). Results indicate that brand hypocrisy is distinguishable from similar constructs in the literature and that it is a significant predictor of negative word-of-mouth and brand distance.

This conceptualization provides managers with a detailed understanding of what constitutes a hypocritical brand in the eyes of consumers as well as insights about how to prevent consumer perceptions of brand hypocrisy.

Findings enrich the understanding of negative consumer inferences related to brands and provide a conceptualization of an understudied but increasingly relevant form of brand judgment.

Politicians of all stripes appeal to the support of the middle class and aim their policy proposals at this group. Reference-group theory explains why citizens could believe themselves to be middle class, even if their income level or social status places them above or below. It postulates that, since the reference groups of most people are relatively homogeneous, anyone could feel ‘average’ compared to the reference group. The authors aim to test this theory by comparing perceptions about the middle class with a categorisation using objective income statistics. A survey of the adult population of the Canadian province of Quebec showed a significant proportion of citizens believing to be part of the middle class, even though their equivalised income levels placed them outside of a generally recognised income range for this group. Most notably, this subjective misplacement on the income distribution was heavily concentrated among individuals whose incomes were too high to be a part of the middle class. Our results also show that support for higher taxes on the rich might be overstated, as some respondents simply do not realise that they are a part of this group.