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Although prior research documents that analysts sometimes herd their forecasts, very few studies investigate how investors’ judgments are influenced by their perceptions of the likelihood of analyst herding. I conduct an experimental study to investigate the conditions under which investors’ assessments of uncertainty about future earnings are influenced by their perceptions of the likelihood of analyst herding. As expected, and consistent with motivated reasoning, the results show that the temporal order of analyst forecasts influences investors’ estimates of the likelihood of analyst herding and investors’ uncertainty judgments when analyst forecasts are preference-inconsistent but not when analyst forecasts are preference-consistent. This study provides a potential explanation for the mixed findings of prior research in regard to investors’ reactions to the likelihood of analyst herding. In addition, this study extends research on investors’ credulity by providing evidence that motivated reasoning and skepticism may serve as a mechanism that contributes to that credulity.

This study examines how project uncertainties (environmental uncertainty and participant uncertainty) affect guanxi and contractual governance and assesses the mediating role of guanxi governance between project uncertainty and contractual governance.

Data were collected in two stages from Chinese contractors. First, in-depth interviews were conducted with nine construction engineering project practitioners in different contracts as a pilot for questionnaire designing. Second, a cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted with professionals and practitioners of construction enterprises to collect primary data. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test seven hypotheses based on data collected from 198 respondents.

Project environmental uncertainty promotes the use of guanxi governance, while project participant uncertainty hinders it; the relationship between both types of uncertainty and contractual governance is the same as with guanxi governance. Furthermore, guanxi governance promotes contractual governance and partially mediates project environmental uncertainty and contractual governance and a complete mediating role between project participant uncertainty and contractual governance.

As the interviewed samples are mainly from China, the study should be replicated using large representative samples from East Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of guanxi governance. Further, while the internal consistency reliability and convergent validity of the questionnaire data in this study align with the standards, a larger sample size would improve the reliability and validity of the research results and better represent the overall work situation of contractors, owners and public policymakers.

The results provide insights into project governance research and have implications for construction practitioners in deploying governance-related resources.

The low success rate of megaprojects stems from the opportunism triggered by uncertainty. Developing trust between participants is an effective means to reduce uncertainty, but this process is inevitably affected by contracts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of uncertainty on participants’ opportunism in megaprojects and the effect of trust on reducing uncertainty. At the same time, the moderating effects of contractual control are tested.

This research classifies trust into competence-based trust and goodwill-based trust and categorizes uncertainty into environmental uncertainty and behavioral uncertainty. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses based on data collected from 172 respondents.

The results show a positive correlation between the two types of uncertainty and opportunism. For the governance of uncertainty, competence-based trust can reduce environmental uncertainty, but it is ineffective for behavioral uncertainty, and goodwill-based trust has a significant effect on both types of uncertainty. The test of moderating effects shows that contractual control strengthens the effect of competence-based trust but weakens the effect of goodwill-based trust, which means that contractual control complements competence-based trust and substitutes for goodwill-based trust.

This research enriches the theory of megaproject management. First, it validates the role of competence-based trust and goodwill-based trust in reducing the different types of uncertainty in megaprojects. Second, this study clarifies the substitution or complementarity between contractual control and different dimensions of trust in the context of high uncertainty, which provides a comprehensive answer to prior research inconsistencies on contractual control and trust.

For practice, this research provides some implications for megaproject management. First, project managers should recognize that the match between trust and project uncertainty is key to the success of megaproject governance. For example, some megaprojects involve many organizations, and there are many difficulties in behavioral supervision and performance appraisal. Therefore, developing goodwill-based trust between participants through positive interactions is an effective means to reduce the behavioral uncertainty of all participants and to curb opportunistic behaviors.

This research validated the role of competence-based trust and goodwill-based trust in reducing the different types of uncertainty in megaprojects. Furthermore, it clarifies the substitution or complementarity between contractual control and different dimensions of trust in the context of high uncertainty, which provides a comprehensive answer to prior research inconsistencies on contractual control and trust.

This study explores the yet understudied productive aspects of uncertainty in the organization of creative collaboration and scrutinizes the practices that allow participants to fruitfully use it as a resource for the creation of novelty. In contrast to former conceptualizations of uncertainty as a quantity to be reduced through organizing, we apply a qualitative heuristic where uncertainty may shift different dimensions regarding participation (who?), procedure (how?) and content (what?). Based on eight creativity biographies in two creative fields, music production and pharmaceutical development, encompassing 36 semi-structured qualitative interviews, we identify embracing, ignoring, and fixing uncertainty as three distinct, yet interrelated practices to engage with uncertainty and thereby enable the emergence of valuable novelty in interaction. We further discover that the participants shift these practices between the different dimensions of uncertainty during the process of creative collaboration. Moreover, we argue that these shifts are necessary to maintain creativity in collaborative processes. Thereupon, we contribute insights to the so far enigmatic notion of organizing for collaborative creativity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine challenges faced by senior construction managers in managing cross‐cultural complexity and uncertainty. The rationale was to identify the key strategies that are considered essential for managing cross‐cultural complexity and uncertainty.

Interviews with 20 senior construction managers, ten in Kenya and ten in the UK, were recorded, transcribed and entered into the qualitative research software NVivo. Validity and reliability were achieved by first assessing the plausibility in terms of already existing knowledge on some of the cultural issues raised by participants. The findings were presented to the participants through workshops and group discussions.

The emerging key issues suggested that project leaders need to learn how to control their own characteristics and to use them selectively. An effective multicultural construction project team should focus on team output and attributes that characterise a multicultural team as a social entity.

Findings indicate that the role of construction project managers has significantly changed over the past two decades. In order to deal with cross‐cultural uncertainty, project leaders must have superior multicultural and interpersonal skills when managing global multicultural heavy engineering projects.

The research shows that leaders of global construction project teams need a good understanding of their culture, environment and the value of their individual contributions.

In this study we focus on how conditions of uncertainty shape the entrepreneurial action that underlies opportunity creation. We utilize the basic structure of economic exchange in the context of opportunity creation theory to further investigate the conditions under which an entrepreneur might be expected to act to bring an opportunity into existence. Specifically, we suggest that uncertainty, that is manifest as relational uncertainty and resource uncertainty, shapes the entrepreneurial actions that underlie the creation of opportunities. In a laboratory experiment we test this hypothesis by observing 56 three-person groups engaged in an opportunity creation-focused exchange task. The results of the experiment support the hypothesis that variability in the conditions of uncertainty (relational uncertainty and resource uncertainty) affects the entrepreneurial action that results in opportunity creation. These results lead us then to propose that there exists a theoretically specifiable set of key entrepreneurial actions (one that is others-focused and another that is works-focused). From this analysis we suggest potential directions for future research in the areas of entrepreneurial action and opportunity creation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the number of activities within a multi-activity experience influences consumer preferences before and after consumption.

The hypotheses are tested using four experiments and a secondary data set from a river cruise firm that includes first-time river cruise purchases by consumers from this firm between January 2011 and December 2015 (n = 337,457).

Consumers prefer experiences with fewer (vs more) activities before consumption – a phenomenon, this paper calls “activity apprehension” – but prefer experiences with more (vs fewer) activities after consumption. A mediation analysis indicates that this phenomenon occurs because the highly perishable nature of activities makes consumers uncertain about their ability to use all the activities within the experience (usage uncertainty).

Evaluations of a multi-activity experience depend on both the number of activities and on whether the consumer is at the pre- or post-consumption stage of the customer journey. As such, firms looking to sell multi-activity experiences should design and promote these experiences in a way that minimizes activity apprehension.

This study is the first to demonstrate that consumer perceptions of an optimal experience depend on both the number of included activities and on the stage of the customer journey (i.e. pre- or post-purchase). It further contributes to the consumer experience literature by examining an unexplored activity characteristic, perishability, in shaping experiential purchase decisions. Finally, it demonstrates a new way in which experiential purchases differ from tangible product purchases.

Although uncertainty has been identified as a key crisis characteristic and a multi-faceted construct essential to effective crisis management research and practice, only a few studies examined publics' perceived uncertainty with a focus on crisis severity uncertainty, leaving crisis responsibility uncertainty uninvestigated in organizational crisis settings.

To close this research gap empirically, this study employed data from an online survey of a total of 817 US adults to examine how participants' crisis responsibility uncertainty and their attribution-based crisis emotions might impact their crisis responses such as further crisis information seeking.

First, findings show that participants' crisis responsibility uncertainty was negatively associated with their attribution-independent (AI) crisis emotions (i.e. anxiety, fear, apprehension and sympathy) and external-attribution-dependent (EAD) crisis emotions (i.e. disgust, contempt, anger and sadness), but positively associated with internal-attribution-dependent (IAD) crisis emotions (i.e. guilt, embarrassment and shame). Second, crisis responsibility uncertainty and AI crisis emotions were positive predictors for participants' further crisis information seeking. Third, AI crisis emotions and IAD crisis emotions were parallel mediators for the relationship between participants' crisis responsibility uncertainty and their further crisis information seeking.

Organizations need to pay attention to the perceived uncertainty about crisis responsibility and attribution-based crisis emotions since they can impact the decision of seeking crisis information during an ongoing organizational crisis.

This study improves uncertainty management in organizational crisis communication research and practice, connecting crisis responsibility uncertainty, attribution-based crisis emotions and publics' crisis information seeking.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interesting but largely unexamined impact of self-uncertainty on the persuasiveness of self-deprecating advertisement.

In the present research, the experimental design and survey methods are used to collect data. Furthermore, the ANOVA and bootstrap analysis methods are adopted to verify whether a self-deprecating advertisement is more persuasive for consumers experiencing self-uncertainty and explore the mediating role of self-verification.

Study 1 indicates that people experiencing self-uncertainty are more likely to engage in actual self-verification. Study 2 demonstrates that consumers experiencing self-uncertainty are more likely to purchase products in a self-deprecating advertisement (vs. self-enhancing advertisement), and actual self-verification motive underlies this effect. In Study 3, a novel boundary condition for the main effect–product type (hedonic vs. utilitarian) is found, and it further reveals that the impact of self-uncertainty on the persuasiveness of self-deprecating advertisement will attenuate when the advertised product is utilitarian.

This research reveals that self-deprecating advertising is more desirable for consumers who experience self-uncertainty. Based on the conclusions in this paper, the self-deprecating advertising is more attractive and desirable for consumers who are reminded about their personal uncertainties. Thus, marketers could employ self-deprecating (vs. self-enhancing) advertisement to promote products. For example, in order to promote the waterproof function of iPhone 12, Apple China released a self-deprecating advertisement of “Splash proof and water resistant. Don't worry, iPhone.”

First, this research not only sheds new light on the relationship between self-uncertainty and the persuasiveness of self-deprecating advertisement but also verifies the mediating role of self-verification motive in this relationship. Moreover, this research reveals that self-uncertainty is a significant factor in how people react to the self-deprecating advertisement. It is noteworthy that the self-uncertainty effect is more likely to be found when the advertised product is related to hedonic or experiential consumption as opposed to utilitarian consumption.

Industry interest in equity‐based contingent claims models for evaluating credit risky securities has recently surged. These methods assume away valuation uncertainty that exists in practice. This article explores the impact of valuation uncertainty on these contingent claims models, by analyzing how varying levels of model uncertainty bias default probability estimates obtained from standard contingent claims models.