Personal autonomy is increasingly challenged by institutional rules and societal demands. This research examines how institutional restrictions on what people do, when they do it, and how they do it influence their experience of agency. Across two experimental studies, participants indicated their experienced agency in everyday scenarios where institutions determined one or more of these three components. The results indicate that experienced agency is most strongly undermined when institutions decide what goal a person must pursue. The more components were restricted, the lower the experienced agency, revealing a cumulative effect. The second study further tested whether framing the achievement of a goal as an opportunity to experience freedom could buffer against these effects. This manipulation did not attenuate the impact of restrictions, suggesting that immediate control over decision-making plays a more critical role in shaping experience of agency than anticipated future freedoms. These findings offer insight into how institutional rules shape people’s experience of agency and may help guide the design of policies that better respect and preserve personal autonomy.

This introduction paper for our special issue on Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNEs) situates the important theme of CMNE growth within the context of rapid technological innovation, intensified geopolitical tensions, and trade wars in the global business environment of the mid-2020s. Using this context as a backdrop, we discuss the growth of CMNEs to derive implications for international business (IB) theory. We review key theoretical perspectives that inform prior research on CMNEs and outline the key challenges confronting CMNEs’ international expansion, as gauged against prior research. We summarize key theoretical insights from the eight papers included in this special issue. We then illustrate how future research can be informed by an explicit consideration of the international sanctions and geopolitical tensions in which CMNEs operate, as well as by the growing technological, linguistic, and ideological distance between China and European and North American countries, which influences CMNEs’ international strategies. We conclude by noting that at this critical juncture in CMNEs’ development, there are substantial opportunities for the IB community to broaden research and challenge existing theories by capturing the latest trends in the international expansion of CMNEs.

We argue that firms’ ability to disinvest real assets helps rationalize the negative distress premiums in stocks, bonds, and, as we show, loans and firm assets. Using a real options model in which shareholders and debtholders share disinvestment proceeds, the model suggests that the stock (debt) distress premium becomes more negative with the proceeds paid out to that class, and that both premiums can be negative when debtholders receive most of the proceeds. Using hard-asset disinvestment-ability proxies, the stock (bond or loan) distress premium becomes less (more) negative with those proxies, possibly suggesting that shareholders benefit more strongly from nonsecured-asset disinvestments.

Individual loss reserving methods have undergone substantial development in the past decade, driven by increased accessibility to granular-level insurance claims data. This paper presents a micro loss reserving model tailored for multi-coverage insurance policies, where a single insurance claim might trigger payments from multiple coverage types. We employ a copula-based multivariate regression approach to jointly model the settlement time and loss amount, effectively capturing the dependence among various types of loss amounts and their correlation with the settlement time. We stress the importance of considering both types of dependence for accurate reserving prediction and uncertainty quantification. Furthermore, we propose computationally efficient algorithms for parameter estimation and dynamic prediction. Through numerical experiments and real data analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed multivariate predictive model in loss reserving applications.

The UK has recently introduced regulations to prevent design features of online gambling products that may ‘encourage problem gambling behaviour’. One change has been to prohibit win-associated and celebratory audiovisual effects following monetary losses in online slots, intended to disable a misleading design feature known as ‘losses disguised as wins’ (LDWs). We assessed 26 popular online slots available to UK consumers. Contrary to regulatory guidance, 17 used win-associated sounds following LDWs, and 18 used sound effects following LDWs that we judged as ‘celebratory’. To independently validate our appraisal of these sound effects, we asked 400 UK-based gamblers to assess whether a selection of sound effects recorded from commercially available online slots communicated a positive outcome. In every case, the average consumer classifications of the recorded sounds were consistent with our own, validating our initial assessments. These results suggest that the misuse of celebratory sound effects in online slots still occurs in the UK market, despite this regulation. We argue that this is in part due to ambiguities in regulatory guidance that have enabled operators to technically comply with the regulation while circumventing its intended effect. We conclude by offering suggestions to amend and improve this regulation.

This paper engages with recent work on formalization in economics to develop a new perspective on mathematization. Boylan and O’Gorman draw on foundations of mathematics to argue that classical mathematics is inappropriate for economics; intuitionistic foundations and constructive mathematics should be used instead. The use of real analysis would be blocked and equilibrium results undermined. I argue that their line of thought faces several challenges; however, I then draw on their analyses and the philosophy of applied mathematics to propose a novel approach in which questions about mathematization are properly understood as questions about the contextual aptness of relevant idealizations.

This paper studies the transition to high inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a behavioral version of the New Keynesian model, which replaces the conventional assumption of rational expectations with subjective and heterogeneous expectations. Different shares of agents in the economy form expectations based on alternative views regarding future economic variables: (1) a share of agents forecasts that inflation and output will rapidly revert to steady state; (2) another share forms forecasts based on a model resembling the MSV solution under rational expectations; (3) a third share of agents uses an under-specified model that captures trend-following, adaptive, or extrapolative behavior. Agents learn over time the parameters of their perceived model and they can also shift across different views based on past forecasting performance. The macroeconomic model is estimated using Bayesian methods to fit realized macroeconomic variables and data on expectations from surveys. The results document an additional channel that operates through switches in agents’ perceptions and amplifies the impact of the original inflationary shocks. In response to rising inflation after COVID, agents begin shifting from the mean reversion model to the trend-following specification (with a belief about perceived inflation persistence that is simultaneously revised upward). Consequently, the impact of inflationary shocks is magnified and the effects of monetary policy attenuated.

This study examines whether behaviourally informed training can improve the effectiveness of phone-based tax debt collection in a public-sector setting. In collaboration with the Bulgarian National Revenue Agency, we implemented a two-day training programme for call centre agents focused on persuasion, negotiation and behavioural influence techniques derived from behavioural science and nudge theory. The impact of the intervention is assessed using descriptive comparisons of monthly aggregated debt-collection performance indicators before and after the training. We find that, following the intervention, trained agents achieved markedly better outcomes relative to pre-intervention periods, including an increase of approximately 20% in the total amount of debt collected over the subsequent three months and a higher rate of secured payment agreements. Notably, these improvements contrast with historical seasonal patterns that typically show a decline in collections during the same period. While the analysis is descriptive and does not permit definitive causal inference, the results provide strong indicative evidence that targeted behavioural training can enhance compliance outcomes in live, interpersonal interactions. The study contributes to the behavioural public policy and persuasion literatures by extending behavioural insights beyond written or digital nudges to real-time, conversational settings. From a practical perspective, the findings highlight the potential value of soft-skills and behavioural training for frontline public servants as a scalable and cost-effective tool for improving tax administration performance.

We study the classical relationship between a firm’s investment and q, for which an unobserved persistent shock is an important factor in the investment decision. In our setting, besides the potential measurement problem of q, controlling for the unobserved shock becomes a new challenge. We develop an estimation method that addresses both econometric issues given timing and information set assumptions. Using 16,256 unique public firms in the United States from 1975 to 2021, we find that q remains a significant factor of investment even after controlling for the unobserved shock and measurement error.