Prospects and problems in modeling group decisions

This paper summarizes some of the major issues related to group decision modeling. We briefly review the existing work on group choice models in marketing and consumer research. We draw some generalizations about which models work well when and use those generalizations to provide guidelines for future research.     

The corporation and profits

In this paper I argue that a theory of the firm that takes profit maximizing to be the essential activity and purpose of the firm is seriously inadequate. I argue that firms in the actual economy neither are nor should be maximizers of profit. I argue instead that firms are and must be satisficers, that they must make enough profit to satisfy the various demands which they encounter in their operation. Yet it should be clear that the notion of satisficing, while it escapes the major problems encountered by maximization, itself lacks much of any very clear content. In the end I claim that the notion of satisficing can best be understood if we abandon the traditional characterization of profits and replace it with a notion of extended profits, which I define as that part of corporate revenue which is available for distribution among stockholders, management, and labor, and for reinvestment in the corporation's business operation. David E. Schrader is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. Professor Schrader's primary areas of research interest include applied ethics, philosophy of economics and philosophy of religion. In addition to being the author of a number of articles in applied ethics and philosophy of religion, he is the editor of Ethics and the Practice of Law(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988).I want to express my gratitude to Austin College for granting me the sabbatical leave during which time I pursued the research which led to this paper, and to the Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware for providing both a place and additional support for that research. I particularly want to thank Norman E. Bowie, Director of the Center for the Study of Values, for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Prohibiting State Aid in an Integrated Market: Cournot and Bertrand Oligopolies with Differentiated Products

The prohibition of state aid in an integrated market such as the European Community is analyzed in a model where firms produce differentiated products and market structure is either Cournot or Bertrand oligopoly. State aid is financed by distortionary taxation so the opportunity cost of government revenue exceeds unity. Under both Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly, if products are sufficiently close substitutes then there exists a range of values for opportunity cost where governments give state aid and where the prohibition of state aid will increase aggregate welfare. With sufficiently differentiated products, the prohibition of state aid will reduce aggregate welfare.     

Experimental analysis of choice

Experimental choice analysis continues to attract academic and applied attention. We review what is known about the design, conduct, analysis, and use of data from choice experiments, and indicate gaps in current knowledge that should be addressed in future research. Design strategies consistent with probabilistic models of choice process and the parallels between choice experiments and real markets are considered. Additionally, we address the issues of reliability and validity. Progress has been made in accounting for differences in reliability, but more research is needed to determine which experiments and response procedures will consistently produce more reliable data for various problems.Sawtooth SoftwareDecision Research     

Using stated response choice data to enrich revealed preference discrete choice models

There is growing interest in exploring the view that both revealed preference (RP) and stated preference (SP) data have useful information and that their integration will enrich the overall explanatory power of RP choice models. These two types of data have been independently used in the estimation of a wide variety of discrete choice applications in marketing. In order to combine the two data sources, each with independent choice outcomes, allowance must be made for their different scaling properties. The approach uses a full information maximum likelihood estimation procedure of the hierarchical logit form to obtain suitable scaling parameters to make one or more data sets comparable. We illustrate the advantages of the dual data strategy by comparing the results with those obtained from models estimated independently with RP and SP data. Data collected as part of a study of high speed rail is used to estimate a set of illustrative mode choice models.     

My Boss is Morally Disengaged: The Role of Ethical Leadership in Explaining the Interactive Effect of Supervisor and Employee Moral Disengagement on Employee Behaviors

The popular press is often fraught with high-profile illustrations of leader unethical conduct within corporations. Leader unethical conduct is undesirable for many reasons, but in terms of managing subordinates, it is particularly problematic because leaders directly influence the ethics of their followers. Yet, we know relatively little about why leaders fail to apply ethical leadership practices. We argue that some leaders cognitively remove the personal sanctions associated with misconduct, which provides them with the “freedom” to ignore ethical shortcomings. Drawing on moral disengagement theory (Bandura 1986, 1999), we examine the relationship between supervisor moral disengagement and employee perceptions of ethical leadership. We then examine the moderating role of employee moral disengagement, such that the negative relationship between supervisor moral disengagement and employee perceptions of ethical leadership is stronger when employee moral disengagement is low versus high. Finally, we examine ethical leadership as a conditional mediator (based on employee moral disengagement) that explains that relationship between supervisor moral disengagement and employee job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Results from a multi-source field survey provide general support for our theoretical model.     

Finance for development and islamic banking

Islamic banking, where fixed interest contracts are banned, needs if it is to be successful to operate within a type of financial system in which bank-industry relationships are sufficiently close and pervasive for profit- and loss-sharing arrangements to be acceptable to both sides. However, the creation of such a business culture is likely to be difficult.     

Some characterizations of stockpiling behavior under uncertainty

The objective of this note is to gain new theoretical insights into stockpiling phenomena. The model used to derive our results envisions consumers as responding optimally to uncertainties in the promotion environment. We show that, all else being equal, consumers will stockpile a promoted product more intensely: (i) the lower the availability of deal opportunities, (ii) the smaller the expected deal discount, and (iii) the lower the uncertainty about the deal/regular price, provided that dealing occurs with high/low frequency.