Advancements in information technology and graphics software mean that colour graphics are an increasingly important part of the communication of business operations and corporate reporting. Unfortunately, the research literature on the effects of colour graphics on decision performance is sparse, and lends only limited and qualified support to the claims often made for colour coded graphics. There has been no research in the accounting environment of the impact of non‐redundant colour graphics (i.e. those not complemented by numerical or pattern support) on decision‐making performance. The existing literature suggests that gender, task complexity, field dependence and time constraints will all impact on the effectiveness of the use of colour, so this paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment designed to assess the interaction effects of non‐redundant colour coding in bar charts with information complexity, and with gender. A multivariate bankruptcy prediction decision is the task environment. Non‐redundant coding, rather than redundant coding, is used in this paper, to force subjects to use the actual colour coding in their decisions and in order to evaluate the effects of colour coding more fully. The results suggest that proponents of colour graphics must qualify their claims. Colour graphics improve decision making, though their impact is significant only when information complexity is low, and then for female subjects only.
This study investigates the value relevance of the IAS 27 Consolidated and Separate Financial Statements (2003) revision, which requires the presentation of non-controlling interest as components of equity and earnings. The investigation is carried out in the context of companies publicly listed in Hong Kong during where IAS 27 (2003 is replaced by the local but word-for-word equivalent standard of HKAS 27 (2004). The results of this study provide strong evidence that the revision has significant value relevance in changing investors' perception about non-controlling interest, which is no longer perceived as liabilities. Investors have apparently not been confused by the revised presentation of non-controlling interest within equity and continue to associate company values only with the equity amount actually owned by the parent company's shareholders. The results of this study give support for the accounting regulator's first move towards the economic unit theory of consolidated financial statements.
Accounting information is essentially multivariate and the relationships among variables may be difficult to establish. Differing multivariate information presentation methods may impact on the quality of the decisions made by users. Existing studies in this area have given scant attention to differences between individual users, despite earlier suggestions from the second author of this paper that both gender and personality might impact on information processing. This study focuses on the interaction of the decision maker (addressing issues of gender, personality, cognitive style and ability) with the data presentation method (including tables, graphical and pictorial methods) in the management decision making process. The paper reports on experiments conducted with respondents of varying degrees of accounting sophistication, using a failed/non‐failed decision environment. Results provide support for the use of graphical and pictorial methods as means of representing data for this decision task, while also identifying the influence of gender, spatial ability and tolerance of ambiguity. These findings have implications for the matching of information presentation with the characteristics of the decision maker in management decision making.
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