Nandan Prabhu

Laws increasingly require human oversight of automated and AI-enabled decisions, yet compliance is usually shown by an oversight provision or continued system use. Neither shows whether the person assigned can interpret, depart from, challenge, or correct a decision, and none of the frameworks reviewed shows how to evidence such authority for a named role. This conceptual article develops a protocol for doing so by synthesising information systems, oversight, contestability and authority research under stated inclusion rules, and illustrates it with two published judgments, on credit scoring and on sentencing. The resulting Decision Authority Profile fixes a governing reference before evidence is examined, classifies each critical capacity as unavailable, nominally available, feasibly enactable or demonstrated, admits dependencies only where the reference implies them, and reports gaps in the record apart from failures of authority. In those cases, it separates a favourable ruling from an access right never fulfilled, and a judge’s retained authority from a law that lacked later safeguards. The contribution is a testable procedure for classifying, from evidence, what a named role can enact under a stated reference, with its failure conditions set in advance. For theory, it makes the gap between formal and real authority observable for named roles; for practice, once piloted, it gives regulators and auditors a record of what an overseer can do.

This study investigates women’s mutual-fund investment behaviour by mapping the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic drivers. Survey data from 474 women were analyzed with decision-tree modelling and feature importance metrics, enabling an objective ranking of determinants and a robust classification of investors versus non-investors. Findings confirm that financial knowledge and awareness dominate all other predictors of participation. Nevertheless, investment decisions also reflect a non-linear pattern, linking intrinsic attributes of psychological traits, financial independence and financial stability with extrinsic influences such as financial advisory support and, to a lesser extent, market conditions and cultural norms. The model also reveals that advisory guidance markedly increases uptake among women with modest financial knowledge, while risk-averse women remain disengaged despite favourable market signals. By integrating these factors within a single analytical framework, the study offers practitioners actionable insights for designing targeted advisory strategies, literacy and training programmes, and policy interventions that can expand women’s engagement with mutual funds.

Purpose: This research investigates whether excellence-seeking is better than perfection-seeking for reducing workaholism. Accordingly, this study examines the effects of perfectionism and excellencism on workaholism’s components: working excessively and compulsively. Although the prior research has shown the positive impact of perfectionism on workaholism, this is the first study to have examined the effects of perfectionism, conceptualized as personal standards perfectionism, in Gaudreau (2019) model of excellencism and perfectionism, on workaholism’s components: working excessively and compulsively. Design/methodology/approach: This study used person-centered analysis to investigate the perfectionism/excellencism–workaholism relationship. Two studies were conducted on corporate and academic samples of 360 and 694, respectively. Latent profile analysis was employed to test the hypotheses. Findings: The results of the person-centered analysis showed that excellence-seekers experience a reduction in excessive and compulsive work tendencies. In contrast, perfection-seekers experience strengthened workaholism. Originality/value: This research’s novelty stems from its five contributions to the perfectionism–workaholism research discourse: excellence-seeking as the reference point for comparison with perfection-seeking, verifying the application of the law of diminishing marginal return (increasing marginal risks) to the effects of perfectionism on workaholism, validating the conceptual distinction between perfectionism and excellencism and their effects on workaholism’s components, demonstrating the unique results of the person-centered analysis and providing empirical evidence for the psycho-dimensionality of workaholism.

The model of excellencism and perfectionism (MEP) theorizes that the attitude toward goals as characterized in excellencism is desirable over perfectionism. Using the self-determination theory (SDT), this study aims to investigate the varying effects of perfectionism and excellencism on work engagement and performance. The study used a time-lagged multi-phase, multi-source, and cross-sectional online survey to collect responses from 360 corporate employees of Indian companies in the services industry. The results indicate that while both perfectionism and excellencism entail pursuing high standards, they relate differently with performance and work engagement. Interestingly, excellencism and work engagement were significantly associated with performance (p < .001); however, perfectionism was insignificant (p = .989). Perfectionism strengthens work engagement (β = 0.112; p = .013), while excellencism has an insignificant effect (β = 0.035; p = .537). Work engagement fully mediates the perfectionism-performance relationship. This demonstrates that striving for excellence alone is sufficient to achieve positive performance, challenging the traditional belief that one must focus on perfection. Furthermore, perfectionism is positively associated with performance only when employees are engaged and have positive motivation toward work.

While social entrepreneurship scholars in the past have focused much on the building blocks of robust social entrepreneurship business models and sustainability factors including supportive ecosystem elements, it is not clear ‘what’ categories of the interactive ecosystem in which social entrepreneurs are located influence the choice of business models even before they operationalize their social ventures. Accordingly, this study espouses a mixed-method research design to address this issue. The authors collected data from 24 and 112 social entrepreneurs in two study phases, respectively. Four support factors—business, market, financial and policy were considered important by social entrepreneurs in India that they believe influenced their choice of business models. While policy and financial support factors were considered most important by social entrepreneurs with a pure social mission/impact orientation, market and business support were considered significant influential factors by social entrepreneurs with a profit orientation. Social entrepreneurs who sought a balance between social and economic missions, however, considered the presence of financial and market support to be crucial for choosing a relevant business model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the inherent priori influence of prevalent ecosystem factors on social business model selection. It uniquely brings out an empirical association between ecosystem factors and business model preferences, affirming that factors pivotal to choice also underpin sustainability. Moreover, this study also unveils an interactive framework encompassing entrepreneur traits and their orientations, ecosystem factors, feedback and performance. Offering multiple actionable implications, this study offers key insights for policy decision-makers and practitioners.