Consumer value conflicts surrounding ethical food purchase decisions: a focus on animal welfare

Ethical attitudes in relation to meat purchases were studied among urban and rural consumers in Scotland. All subjects perceived at least some ethical issues in relation to animal production systems, in particular, systems keeping animals in close confinement. Welfare‐friendly production systems were viewed as adding value to a food, but this value was not necessarily realizable to producers if purchases occurred only when foods were on special offer. Statements made by individuals were often contradictory, revealing ambivalence, unresolved value conflicts and a general lack of involvement in the nature of meat production. A number of barriers to the establishment of stable attitudes and behaviours in relation to the ethical treatment of food animals were also identified. A key finding of the study is that individuals can hold two views on animal welfare. On the one hand, they may think as citizens influencing societal standards, and on the other, as consumers at the point of purchase. As citizens, they support the notion of animals being entitled to a good life; as meat consumers, they avoid the cognitive connection with the live animal. This paper explores both the citizen–consumer relationship and purchase strategies used by consumers to resolve value conflicts. Lessons for public and commercial policy are highlighted in the context of the Curry Report (2002) which advocates more effective market segmentation where markets are finely attuned to their customers, with the development of a number of assurance schemes discussed in the article.     

Regulating B2B online reverse auctions through voluntary codes of conduct

In response to real and perceived abuse by market makers, buyers, and sellers, some industry trade groups representing suppliers have developed voluntary codes of conduct, white papers, and other forms of guidance for online reverse auction participants. The intent of these guidelines is to improve both the reverse auction process and relationships between buyers and sellers. This paper examines the rationale for creating guidelines and codes of conduct, and examines their efficacy in regulating reverse auctions to achieve improved outcomes for market makers, buyers, and sellers. Data from primary and related secondary sources indicate that industry-specific codes of conduct and guidelines have not had a favorable impact.     

Wage rigidity and capital mobility in an optimizing model of a small open economy

Summary This paper formulates an optimizing model of a small open economy with a representative (immortal) household, a firm and a government. The asset menu consists of domestic currency, non-traded bonds and traded bonds. There is a risk premium on traded bonds, which leads to deviations from perfect capital mobility and uncovered interest parity. Taxes are lump-sum, so that finance by bonds and by taxation are equivalent. The model allows for current-account and wealth dynamics. The model assumes either purchasing power parity or imperfect substitution between home and foreign goods and either labour market equilibrium, nominal wage rigidity or real wage rigidity. The steady-state effects of a fiscal contraction, a monetary disinflation and an increase in the world interest rate are discussed. The transient effects of these policies are analysed with the aid of a multiple shooting algorithm.We thank Gerard Staarink for implementing the multiple shooting algorithm used in section 4 and we thank Professors M. Fase and J. Pen for their constructive comments on a previous version of this paper. The paper is a shortened version of discussion paper No. 168 of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London.     

A theoretical foundation for Constant Market Share analysis

Constant Market Share (CMS) analysis is a popular tool for analyzing changes in exports of a country. Nevertheless, its theoretical foundations (and policy relevance) have been questioned. In this paper, we provide such a foundation by relating CMS analysis to a two-stage homothetic demand model. An indication of the empirical relevance of this relationship is given by comparing the CMS analysis with a two-stage Constant Elasticity of Substitution demand model applied to 1972–1976 data of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).Paper presented at the XX-th world conference of the Applied Econometric Association in Istanbul, December 1986. The research reported in this paper was carried out as part of the project Disequi-librium and Equilibrium in Demand and Supply, which is approved by the Dutch Office of Education and Sciences. Ivo J. Steyn and Philip A. ten Cate provided excellent research assistance. We thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments.     

Management development and business ethics: A view from the U.K.

This article is written in the context of current British interest in management training and development, in which an emphasis on competency is viewed critically, as technically oriented, with little attention paid to ethics and moral values. It is suggested that a concern for ethics in management development can be expressed in terms of four requisite management attributes or qualities: theoretical knowledge and understanding; affective qualities; personal and interpersonal skills; and self-knowledge. Following Kohlberg's work on moral development, the cultivation of these attributes is viewed as a life-span process involving three broadly defined forms of management development practice, each appropriate to different circumstances and stages in a learner's career. It is concluded that the conventional teaching of theory, learning from experience and counselling/mentoring, are equally important in the contribution which management development can make to the resolution of ethical dilemmas in business practice.Patrick Maclagan is a lecturer in organisational behaviour and managerial ethics at the School of Management, University of Hull, U.K., where he is also on the Steering Committee of the Social Values Research Centre, His current research concerns the relationship between management development and ethics in organisations.     

An efficient nonparametric estimator for models with nonlinear dependence

We provide a convenient econometric framework for the analysis of nonlinear dependence in financial applications. We introduce models with constrained nonparametric dependence, which specify the conditional distribution or the copula in terms of a one-dimensional functional parameter. Our approach is intermediate between standard parametric specifications (which are in general too restrictive) and the fully unrestricted approach (which suffers from the curse of dimensionality). We introduce a nonparametric estimator defined by minimizing a chi-square distance between the constrained densities in the family and an unconstrained kernel estimator of the density. We derive the nonparametric efficiency bound for linear forms and show that the minimum chi-square estimator is nonparametrically efficient for linear forms.     

On estimating the mean of the selected normal population under the LINEX loss function

Following Parsian and Farsipour (1999), we consider the problem of estimating the mean of the selected normal population, from two normal populations with unknown means and common known variance, under the LINEX loss function. Some admissibility results for a subclass of equivariant estimators are derived and a sufficient condition for the inadmissibility of an arbitrary equivariant estimator is provided. As a consequence, several of the estimators proposed by Parsian and Farsipour (1999) are shown to be inadmissible and better estimators are obtained. Received January 2001/Revised May 2002