Does CEO make a better acquisition decision after SOX?

Better science does not make decisions easier

Forty years of development in the science and technology of estimating and quantifying risk, of understanding of human behaviour and human rationale has made decision makers more informed. We are in a much better position now, than forty years ago in estimating probabilities, consequences, and damages, and in estimating and dealing with the associated uncertainties in an organised way. This did...

Risky Decisions and Decision Support - Does Stress Make a Difference?

Studies of human decision making have demonstrated that stress exacerbates risk taking. Since all decisions involve some element of risk, stress has critical impact on decision quality. Decisions are found to improve with stress up to an optimal threshold beyond which deterioration is observed. However, few studies have examined the psychological experiences underlying risk-taking behavior in c...

Does corporate governance make financial reports better, or just better for equity investors?

Financial reports should provide useful information to both shareholders and creditors, according to U.S. accounting principles. However, directors of corporations have fiduciary duties only toward equity holders, and those fiduciary duties normally do not extend to the interests of creditors. We examine whether this slant in corporate governance biases financial reports in favor of equity inve...

RACTICE Make Better Decisions

Bitter to Better - How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency

Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency which has attracted a substantial number of users. We perform an in-depth investigation to understand what made Bitcoin so successful, while decades of research on cryptographic e-cash has not lead to a large-scale deployment. We ask also how Bitcoin could become a good candidate for a long-lived stable currency. In doing so, we identify several issues ...