Towards an ethical dimension of decision making in organizations

There is a growing need to increase our understanding of ethical decision making in U.S. based organizations. The authors examine the complexity of creating uniform ethical standards even when the meaning of ethical behavior is being debated. The nature of these controversies are considered, and three important dimensions for ethical decision making are discussed: leaders with integrity and a strong sense of social responsibility, organization cultures that foster dialogue and dissent, and organizations that are willing to reflect on and learn from their actions. Leaders with integrity demonstrate consistency between vision and action that promotes trust, regularly concern themselves with developing moral standards, and are proactive agents of change in an increasingly complex world. Organizational cultures that support dialogue suspend judgments and increase their capacity to think together towards new levels of understanding. Ethical concepts evolve in these organizational cultures, and actions are informed and responsible. Organizations that reflect on their actions engage in double loop learning so that the time taken to reflect on the past and present leads to a more judicious and ethical future. In essence, the authors point to organizational guidelines for ethical decision making that lead to an increase in members' capacity to think and act ethically. Jonathan Z. Gottlieb is a consultant to organizations and a Ph.D. Candidate in Organizational Psychology. His interests include organization redesign, leadership and team development, ethics, and role definition for organization development practitioners. Jyotsna Sanzgiri is Dean of Organizational Psychology Programs at the California School of Professional Psychology — Alameda. She received her Ph.D. in business Administration and her M.B.A. Her interests include organizational theory and core values across cultures, and the historical underpinnings of organization development and behavior.     

Asymmetric information in late 19th century cooperative insurance societies

Between 1880 and 1930, cooperative insurance was the main source of illness, accident, and death insurance in the United States, Canada, and England. This paper tests for asymmetric information in cooperative insurance societies and examines how their pricing policies affected the profile of members. We find strong evidence that, unlike their modern substitutes, cooperative societies were able to overcome the asymmetry of information. Furthermore, as a consequence of non-actuarial pricing, our results suggest that workers deferred their membership until they were about 40 years old.     

Managerial Intentions and Wage Determination in the Canadian Petroleum Industry

Scant attention has been given to the impact of managerial objectives on wage policies. This study demonstrates that in the Canadian petroleum industry, which has minimal wage dispersion, managerial objectives—in particular, a tendency toward imitative behavior and a strategy of union avoidance—do affect wage determination.     

The ideological influence in Schumpeter's thought

Journal of Economics -     

The Earned Income Tax Credit: Targeting the poor but crowding out wealth

This paper quantifies the individual, aggregate and welfare effects of the US Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). In particular, we analyze the labour supply and saving responses to changes in tax credit generosity and their implications for prices and welfare. Our results show that the EITC is a subsidy on labour income and a tax on savings. An increase in EITC generosity raises labour force participation, reduces savings for many and provides insurance to working poor households. The EITC reduces earnings inequality but increases the skill premium and wealth inequality. A 10% increase in tax credit generosity increases welfare by 0.31% and benefits the majority of the population.     

The EU public procurement regime— Does it work?

Has the Single Market for public procurement had the expected effects after six years in progress? The following article attempts to answer this question by first presenting alternative theoretical approaches to analysing the EU liberalisation of the public procurement market and then confronting these with the result of an empirical analysis.     

Hyperdeterminantal point processes

As well as arising naturally in the study of non-intersecting random paths, random spanning trees, and eigenvalues of random matrices, determinantal point processes (sometimes also called fermionic point processes) are relatively easy to simulate and provide a quite broad class of models that exhibit repulsion between points. The fundamental ingredient used to construct a determinantal point process is a kernel giving the pairwise interactions between points: the joint distribution of any number of points then has a simple expression in terms of determinants of certain matrices defined from this kernel. In this paper we initiate the study of an analogous class of point processes that are defined in terms of a kernel giving the interaction between 2M points for some integer M. The role of matrices is now played by 2M-dimensional “hypercubic” arrays, and the determinant is replaced by a suitable generalization of it to such arrays—Cayley’s first hyperdeterminant. We show that some of the desirable features of determinantal point processes continue to be exhibited by this generalization.     

Do economists have anything to contribute to the debate on urban sprawl? (and would anbody listen to them if they did?)

This essay explores reasons for the relative shortage of work by economists on the subject of urban sprawl. I argue that a correct economic understanding of the sprawl issue is difficult to communicate. Meanwhile, a simplified caricature of economic thinking on sprawl has emerged. It argues that decentralized, low-density development has been chosen by the “free market”, therefore the problem signified by the word sprawl does not exist. This argument, made in the name of economics but not always by economists, has served to polarize the detabe as much as to enlighten it. I propose an alternative understanding of the economics of sprawl that provides common ground for debate among economists, planners, and politicians. The author is associate director of the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management. In a prior life, he studied cost-of-sprawl issues for the New Jersey Office of State Planning. Thanks go to Rachael Callanan for assistance on this paper.