Nowadays, people with limited information processing capability are unable to cope with an exponentially increasing amount of information, leading to a phenomenon called information overload. This phenomenon has widely been recognized to have adverse effects on decision quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of using graphs as decision aids to reduce the adverse effects of information overload on decision quality. The results obtained from an experiment simulating a real business prediction task with a sample of business managers indicated that prediction accuracy deteriorated under information overload. However, the mode of presentation format alone did not have any significant impact on prediction accuracy; nor did the interactions of information load and the mode of presentation format. The implications of these results are discussed. 50 1 2

Using data for the Hong Kong stock market, where individual investors' sentiment is likely to be influential, this study finds that the publication of individual investors' sentiment temporarily affects stock prices regardless of the publication's incompetence in predicting stock returns. Specifically, when the publication reports that more and more investors are optimistic, the return on the day just after the publication is higher and the return several days later is lower. Furthermore, the results are strongest for small stocks, and weakest for large stocks. It seems that some individual investors buy (sell) stocks when others, as reported by the publication, are optimistic (pessimistic), and that the trading causes temporary buying (selling) pressure initially and price reversals afterwards. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2004.

The purpose of this study is to identify attributes of public accounting firms that accounting graduates find most desirable in their job selection decisions, and the impacts of individual differences on these perceptions. Factor analysis performed on the responses of 167 final-year accounting students in Hong Kong to a 30-item questionnaire identified seven factors. The results indicate that accounting graduates considered help in finishing their professional accounting examinations and good staff relationships as the most important criteria in their choice of employers. In addition, female accounting graduates were more concerned about the possibility of being required to travel or be transferred, but were less concerned about the reputation and profile (such as the client base and the size) of the firms than their male counterparts. Accounting graduates with a higher grade point average (GPA) were less concerned about the working environment, but more concerned about a firms' reputation and profile than those with a lower GPA. The implications of these results are discussed.Desired Attributes Public Accounting Firms Job Selection Accounting Graduates,

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The purpose of this study is to identify the most frequently found symptoms of obsolete costing systems and to investigate whether these symptoms are associated to the proportion of overhead related to non‐output unit activities in a business environment in which traditional costing systems are prevalent. Since traditional costing systems use output‐unit related cost drivers to allocate overhead, these systems are more likely obsolete when a large proportion of a firm’s overhead is not directly related to its output volume. The results from a survey with a sample of Hong Kong manufacturing companies indicated that the four most frequently encountered symptoms of obsolete costing systems were: competitors’ prices for high‐volume items appear to be unrealistically low; no resistance from customers to higher prices; frequent use of accounting department to conduct special studies; and establishment of department’s cost systems for decision making. It was also found that the proportion of a firm’s overhead related to non‐output unit activities was positively associated with the total frequency rating of all the proposed symptoms of problem costing systems, suggesting that using an outdated overhead allocation method could be a major cause for a costing system to become obsolete. The implications of these results are discussed.