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Synopsis

The research problem

We investigated the relationship between product market competition and the textual characteristics of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures. Specifically, we investigated three textual characteristics: tone of optimism, tone of tangibility (matter-of-factness), and readability.

Motivation or theoretical reasoning

On the one hand, the three ways in which CSR disclosure can enhance corporate success in competitive product market situations are as follows: (1) More readable disclosures with more optimistic and matter-of-fact tones help firms attract new customers while enhancing customer loyalty and brand value. (2) Increased market competition is expected to encourage firms to provide more-readable CSR disclosures with optimistic and matter-of-fact tones to enhance their access to external financing at lower costs. (3) CSR disclosure may strengthen a firm’s connections with business stakeholders (e.g., employees and suppliers). These connections are conducive to corporate success in competitive product market situations. On the other hand, it is well established that firms find CSR disclosure to be costly.

The test hypotheses

A significant relationship exists between product market competition and the three textual characteristics of CSR disclosures, namely, tone of optimism, tone of tangibility (matter-of-factness), and readability.

Target population

Our sample comprised 2,018 firm-year observations (2002–2020) of listed firms in Australia.

Findings

Our study found that firms facing an increase in product market competition tend to publish less-readable CSR disclosures with less use of optimism and matter-of-fact tones of language, and vice versa. In practical terms, this indicates that firms fail to leverage CSR disclosure in managing their product market competition, even though CSR disclosure is recognized as an effective marketing and brand strategy. Therefore, our study examined whether or not the CSR committee, as a key sustainability governance mechanism on CSR disclosure, could contribute to mitigating this missed opportunity. We found that the negative relationship between the two variables is attenuated by the presence of a CSR committee and by the CSR committee’s effectiveness. Our study should be of interest to firms, users of CSR disclosures, and regulators.

The major drivers for complex applications are cost, efficiency, development time, understandability, usability and more importantly the maintainability. Due to their black box nature, complexity of software components is more crucial for component-based systems. This paper discusses various complexity concerns for these systems and reviews a number of complexity metrics for software components and component-based systems. As interfaces are the only source of information to know about the black-box components, this paper proposes a new interface complexity metric for these components. This metric is based on the information available in the interfaces like interface methods and properties. It also discusses the methodology to assign the weight values to these methods and properties to finally evaluate the complexity of the component. This paper validates the proposed metric against standard Weyukar's properties and empirically evaluates the metric for several Java Bean components. Finally a correlation analysis between proposed metrics and several other metrics like performance, customizability and readability is done to validate the metric.

Background: Review of the recent literature suggests substantial use of the Internet by patients seeking health care information despite questionable accuracy and readability of information presented on some websites. The purpose of our study was to assess the accuracy, quality, and readability of online information regarding trigger finger.

Methods: Three terms (“trigger finger”, “stenosing tenosynovitis”, and “finger locking”) were used to query three Internet search engines to evaluate websites regarding information about trigger finger. Three hand surgery fellows independently assessed website accuracy and quality using standardized scoring criteria. The Fleisch-Kincaid reading grade level score was used to assess website readability. Website authorship and commercial association were also noted.

Results: Sixty-nine unique websites were assessed. Internet information obtained using the search term “stenosing tenosynovitis” was written at a significantly higher reading level than information found using “finger locking” or “trigger finger”. Website quality and accuracy were both significantly better in websites authored by physicians compared to websites authored by non-physicians. However, website accuracy was significantly poorer in websites featuring commercial association. Additionally, websites presenting information written below the 8^th grade reading level demonstrated poorer accuracy.

Conclusions: Search term has a significant effect on the readability of online information regarding trigger finger. Despite the terminology used in searches, most websites are largely inaccurate and may not be easily understandable by the general population. This demonstrates a substantial barrier to accessing accurate health care information and may impact patient outcomes. Hand surgeons should direct patients towards websites presenting accurate information with easily readable content.