›› 2017, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (9): 205-214.

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Empirical Research on the Effect of Decision-makers' Psychological Factors on the Behavior Alienation in Company Intellectual Capital Investment

Zhang Yingzhi1, Liu Zhiyuan1, Zhang Bingfa2   

  1. 1. School of Business, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071;
    2. School of Business, University of Jinan, Jinan 250002
  • Received:2015-08-28 Online:2017-09-28 Published:2017-10-09

Abstract:

Compared with fixed assets investment such as machinery equipment, enterprise intellectual capital investment has the characteristics of non-obvious input-output relation, long payback period and high investment risk, and thus is likely to lead to the phenomena of alienation in intellectual capital investment such as underinvestment or overinvestment. Based on behavioral economics and psychology theory, this paper analyzes the effect of decision makers' psychological factors on the phenomena of alienation in intellectual capital investment and builds a model of the relationship between the top management team's characteristics and the behavior alienation in intellectual capital investment using top management team's characteristics as proxy variable. Then, taking Chinese listed companies in computer, communication and other electronic equipment manufacturing industry as samples, an empirical analysis is carried out. From the empirical results, we find:First,under the top management team characteristics of greater salary heterogeneity, or more part-time proportion, or bigger team size, a company is more inclined to under-invest in intellectual capital investment; Second, under the top management team characteristics of more shareholding heterogeneity, a company is more inclined to over-invest. The empirical results show that the decision-makers' psychological factors such as social identity, distributive justice perceptions, and social background effect of top management team member,have a significant impact on the behavior of alienation in intellectual capital investment.

Key words: intellectual capital investment, alienation of behavior, decision-makers' psychological factors, top management team