A New Perspective on Cross-Cultural Ethical Evaluations: The Use of Conjoint Analysis

The present paper compares the ethical perceptions of Americans and Greeks using conjoint analysis. The two samples were presented with 2 scenarios manipulating three factors: gender of the transgressor, organizational status of the transgressor, and the magnitude of the transgression. For each scenario, conventional mean comparisons and conjoint analyses were performed on five ethical measurements. The matrix of means and the relative importances of the American sample were compared with that of the Greek sample. The results showed that Greeks paid more attention to the dollar amount involved and less attention on the organizational status of the transgressor than Americans did. The gender of the transgressor was the least important factor for both samples. The use of relative importance measures derived from conjoint analysis is shown to provide a new dimension in cross-cultural comparisons.     

The tragedy of the commons in a violent world

Earlier research has shown that the tragedy of the commons may be resolved by Folk theorems for dynamic games. In this article, we graft on a standard natural‐resource exploitation game the possibility to appropriate the resource through violent means. Because conflict emerges endogenously as resources get depleted, the threat supporting the cooperative outcome is no longer subgame perfect, and thus credible. The unique equilibrium is such that players exploit noncooperatively the resource when it is abundant, and they revert to conflict when it becomes scarce. The players' utility is shown to be lower even if conflict wastes no resources.     

Good practices on cost – effective road infrastructure safety investments

The paper presents the findings of a research project aiming to quantify and subsequently classify several infrastructure-related road safety measures, based on the international experience attained through extensive and selected literature review and additionally on a full consultation process including questionnaire surveys addressed to experts and relevant workshops. Initially, a review of selected research reports was carried out and an exhaustive list of road safety infrastructure investments covering all types of infrastructure was compiled. Individual investments were classified according to the infrastructure investment area and the type of investment and were thereafter analysed on the basis of key safety components. These investments were subsequently ranked in relation to their safety effects and implementation costs and on the basis of this ranking, a set of five most promising investments was selected for an in-depth analysis. The results suggest that the overall cost effectiveness of a road safety infrastructure investment is not always in direct correlation with the safety effect and is recommended that cost–benefit ratios and safety effects are always examined in conjunction with each other in order to identify the optimum solution for a specific road safety problem in specific conditions and with specific objectives.     

Endogenous elites: power structure and patron-client relationships

In weak institutional settings, autocrats barter political and economic concessions for support to remain in power and extract rents. Instead of viewing the favors’ beneficiaries, i.e. the elites, as an exogenous entity, we allow the king to decide whom to coopt provided the subjects are heterogeneous in the potential support—their strength—they could bring to the regime. While the ruler can select the elites on the basis of their personal characteristics, an alternative strategy consists in introducing some uncertainty in the cooptation process. The latter strategy allows the king to reduce the clients’ cooptation price since in the event of a revolution the likelihood of being included in the future body of elites is lower. We show that weak rulers are more likely to coopt the society’s strongest individuals, while powerful rulers diversify the composition of their clientele. Moreover, when agents value more future discounted outcomes, the king is more likely to randomly coopt subjects.     

Benchmark Bonds Interactions under Regime Shifts

In the present paper we examine the interactions among five benchmark ten year government bonds, namely those of the USA, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Our aim is to illustrate empirically a net of interactions existing among the major bond markets of Europe and the US market taking into account shifts in the underlying stochastic processes. For this purpose, differing from the rest of the relevant empirical literature, after specifying the long run equilibrium relations we estimate the linkages between the bond markets as subject to hidden Markov chains, by applying the Markov Switching Vector Error Correction framework (MS‐VECM). This formulation is found to efficiently reflect the shifts brought about by significant economic events, such as the European monetary unification. As a result we illustrate different short‐run relations referring to the periods before and after the monetary union. Overall, our empirical results indicate that stronger interactions among the markets of the system exist in the period after the EMU. Also, by means of a variance decomposition analysis we assess leader‐follower relations which indicate that the benchmark status of bonds has changed since the introduction of the common monetary policy framework in Europe.     

Are accounting academics culturally intelligent?: An empirical investigation

Cultural diversity within accounting university classrooms creates a number of educational challenges that have been little investigated. This study draws on the theoretical framework of cultural intelligence (CQ), which is new to accounting research, to enhance understanding of the intercultural capabilities of accounting academics. CQ is comprised of four interrelated capabilities: metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural. The previously validated cultural intelligence scale (CQS) survey was used to identify CQ levels and results were compared to demographic variables and other factors in order to explain differences. The results indicate that accounting academics display levels of CQ at the lower end of comparable studies on other professionals. Results also show that academics who have lived abroad for longer than one year and who have taught transnationally in Southeast Asia are likely to possess significantly higher levels of total CQ. Female accounting academics are more likely to possess higher levels of behavioural CQ indicating a propensity to more easily adapt their behaviour in culturally diverse situations. This paper contributes to the growing literature on CQ by increasing our understanding of the antecedents that influence CQ levels in the area of international experience, through the examination of the potential impact of overseas teaching experiences and overseas residency. Furthermore, this study introduces and examines new measures capturing the breadth and depth of international experience; that of long-term overseas residency and cultural distance.     

Recognition of entrepreneur’s social ties and firm innovation in emerging markets: explanation from the industrial institutional environment and survival pressure

Despite the extensive attention to the role of entrepreneurs’ business or political ties, few studies have distinguished the basis of those social ties. The aim of this study is to explore the different roles of the entrepreneurs’ personalized and formal social ties on the firms’ innovation performance. Based on renqing and formal rules, this study extends the social ties’ typology into four categories, namely, transactional business ties, transactional political ties, guanxi business ties, and guanxi political ties. Using data collected from 209 Chinese firms, we further identify the distinctive contributions of the different ties on the entrepreneurial firm’s innovation performance under different institutional environments and entrepreneurs’ survival pressure. This paper will help researchers and managers better understand the function of social ties in innovation in emerging markets, such as China.

     

Social Planner’s Solution for the Caspian Sea Conflict

This paper evaluates the proposed alternatives for sharing the Caspian Sea from the social planner’s or systems-level perspective with respect to the stakeholders’ utilities from the oil and natural gas resources of the sea. Different multi-criteria decision-making methods, namely dominance, maximin, lexicography, simple additive weighting, and TOPSIS are applied to determine the social planner’s ranking of these alternatives. Results suggest the Condominium governance regime as the most promising division method. Bankruptcy rules and cooperative game theory methods can be considered as the other socially optimal resolutions to the conflict over sharing the Caspian Sea energy resources among its five littoral countries. Consideration of these methods in negotiations may help with resolving the existing deadlock, which has been in place for two decades.     

Measuring moral judgement and the implications of cooperative education and rule-based learning

The Defining Issues Test (DIT), developed by Rest (1986) , measures a person's level of moral development using hypothetical social dilemmas. Although the DIT is useful for measuring moral development in social settings, it might not adequately capture an individual's moral judgement abilities in solving work‐related problems ( Weber, 1990 ; Trevino, 1992 ; Welton et al., 1994 ). In the present study, the moral judgement levels of 97 accounting students were measured over a 1 year period using two separate test instruments, the DIT and a context‐specific instrument developed by Welton et al. (1994) . The test scores are significantly higher on the DIT than the Welton instrument (between the instruments and over time), suggesting that accounting students use higher levels of moral reasoning in resolving hypothetical social dilemmas and lower levels of moral reasoning in resolving context‐specific dilemmas. The difference in test scores was highest during cooperative education (work placement programme), implying that the environment is a significant determinant on students’ test scores.