Angel investor's selection criteria: a comparative institutional perspective

Despite the important role of angel investors as critical financial providers for new ventures, little is known regarding how institutions make their investment decisions. While angels make decisions based on selection criteria during the first stage, they are also embedded within and affected by different institutional settings and as a result weight these criteria differently than other investors. We compare angel investors' selection criteria in China and Denmark using the comparative institutional perspective. We use a policy capturing approach and hierarchy linear modeling, revealing that since Chinese angels are embedded within relationship-based institutional settings they tend to reply more on strong ties such as family and friends in management team, as well as weighting risks less compared to Danish angels operating within more rule-based institutional contexts

A neo-institutional perspective on ethical decision-making

Drawing on neo-institutional theory, this study aims to discern the poorly understood ethical challenges confronted by senior executives in Indian multinational corporations and identify the strategies that they utilize to overcome them. We conducted in-depth interviews with 40 senior executives in Indian multinational corporations to illustrate these challenges and strategies. By embedding our research in contextually relevant characteristics that embody the Indian environment, we identify several institutional- and managerial-level challenges faced by executives. The institutional-level challenges are interpreted as regulative, normative and cognitive shortcomings. We recommend a concerted effort at the institutional and managerial levels by identifying relevant strategies for ethical decision-making. Moreover, we proffer a multi-level model of ethical decision-making and discuss our theoretical contributions and practical implications

“Biological Geometry Perception”: Visual Discrimination of Eccentricity Is Related to Individual Motor Preferences

In the continuum between a stroke and a circle including all possible ellipses, some eccentricities seem more “biologically preferred” than others by the motor system, probably because they imply less demanding coordination patterns. Based on the idea that biological motion perception relies on knowledge of the laws that govern the motor system, we investigated whether motorically preferential and non-preferential eccentricities are visually discriminated differently. In contrast with previous studies that were interested in the effect of kinematic/time features of movements on their visual perception, we focused on geometric/spatial features, and therefore used a static visual display.In a dual-task paradigm, participants visually discriminated 13 static ellipses of various eccentricities while performing a finger-thumb opposition sequence with either the dominant or the non-dominant hand. Our assumption was that because the movements used to trace ellipses are strongly lateralized, a motor task performed with the dominant hand should affect the simultaneous visual discrimination more strongly. We found that visual discrimination was not affected when the motor task was performed by the non-dominant hand. Conversely, it was impaired when the motor task was performed with the dominant hand, but only for the ellipses that we defined as preferred by the motor system, based on an assessment of individual preferences during an independent graphomotor task.Visual discrimination of ellipses depends on the state of the motor neural networks controlling the dominant hand, but only when their eccentricity is “biologically preferred”. Importantly, this effect emerges on the basis of a static display, suggesting that what we call “biological geometry”, i.e., geometric features resulting from preferential movements is relevant information for the visual processing of bidimensional shapes

Everyday-Life Business Deviance Among Chinese SME Owners

Despite its prevalence in emerging economies, everyday-life business deviance (EBD) and its antecedents have received surprisingly little research attention. Drawing on strain theory and the business-ethics literature, we develop a socio-psychological explanation for this deviance. Our analysis of 741 owners of Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) suggests that materialism and trust in institutional justice affect EBD both directly and indirectly in a relationship mediated by the ethical standards of SME owners. These findings have important implications for researching deviant business behavior within SMEs