Defending Gibrat’s Law as a long-run regularity

According to Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect, the growth rate of a given firm is independent of its size at the beginning of the period examined. While earlier studies tended to confirm the Law, more recent research generally rejects it. This article reconciles these two streams of literature, taking into account the role of market selection and learning in reshaping a given population of firms through time. Consistently with previous studies, we find that Gibrat’s Law has to be rejected ex ante, since smaller firms tend to grow faster than their larger counterparts. However, a significant convergence toward Gibrat-like behavior can be detected ex post. This finding is an indication that market selection “cleans” the original population of firms, so that the resulting industrial “core” does not depart from a Gibrat-like pattern of growth. From a theoretical point of view, this result is consistent with those models based on passive and active learning, and can be seen as a defense of the validity of the Law in the long-run.

Business Ethics Training: Insights from Learning Theory

This paper explores research in educational psychology and learning theory in a search for insights to enhance business ethics training Useful educational principles uncovered are then applied to the development of an ethics training initiative for sales professionals. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research to help enrich business ethics training.

What do Corporations have to do with Fair Trade? Positive and Normative Analysis from a Value Chain Perspective

The job of a leader includes caring for others, or taking responsibility for them. All leaders face the challenge of how to be both ethical and effective in their work. This paper focuses on the requirement that leaders be present to care for their followers in times of crisis. It examines the story of Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns. This is a tale that has been repeated in various forms by ancient historians and modern writers. The fact that the story gets repeated through the ages tells us about the kind of care that people expect from their leaders.

‘Consumer Ethics: The Role of Acculturation in U.S. Immigrant Populations’

This study examines the role of acculturation in shaping consumers’ views of ethics. Specifically, it examines the relationships between the desire to keep one’s original culture, the desire to adopt the host culture, and the four dimensions of the Muncy and Vitell (Journal of Business Research Ethics 24(4), 297, 1992) consumer ethics scale. Using two separate immigrant populations – one of former Middle-Eastern residents now living in the U.S. and the other of Asian immigrants in the U.S. – results indicate that those who want to keep their original culture are less tolerant of unethical consumer activities, while those who are more willing to adopt the host culture are more tolerant of these same consumer activities. Furthermore, the immigrants in both studies who are more tolerant of unethical consumer activities are those who are generally somewhat younger and with less formal education. The relationship between gender and consumer ethics was not significant.     

The Mediating Role of Anticipated Guilt in Consumers’ Ethical Decision-Making

In this paper, we theorize that the anticipation of guilt plays an important role in ethically questionable consumer situations. We propose an ethical decision-making framework incorporating anticipated guilt as partial mediator between consumers’ ethical beliefs (anteceded by ethical ideology) and intentions. In the first study, we compared several models using structural equation modeling and found empirical support for our research model. A second experiment was set up to illustrate how these new insights may be applied to prevent consumers from taking advantage of the seller. Results showed that enhancing the anticipation of guilt (by making the interpersonal consequences of the unethical act more salient) increased consumers’ ethical intentions, controlling for ethical beliefs. Together these two studies might have important theoretical and managerial contributions.Sarah Steenhaut is research assistant and doctoral candidate at Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Research Center for Consumer Psychology and Marketing (Belgium). Her research interests lie in the area of ethical aspects and marketing, more specifically, consumers’ ethical beliefs, attitudes and behavior. She has recently published in Journal of Business Ethics.Patrick Van Kenhove is Professor of Marketing at Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Department of Marketing (Belgium). He has recently published in Journal of Business Ethics, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Retailing, Advances in Consumer Research, Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Health Communication and The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research.     

锦江特大桥68+128+68m连续梁0#块托架设计研究

针对铜川—玉屏铁路线锦江特大桥68+128+68m连续梁0#块托架设计计算为工程实例,对连续梁0#块托架的设计计算过程进行了详尽的论述,并结合有限元仿真计算软件Midas对0#块托架各受力构件进行建模数值分析。表明:针对锦江特大桥68+128+68m连续梁0#块托架设计符合力学性能要求。     

高墩悬臂牛腿设计与施工

本文根据沪昆客专跨河大跨度连续梁高墩0#块施工作为背景,结合0#块现浇牛腿的设计与施工,优化常规设计,达到安全可靠,节约成本的的目的,可为同类型施工提供参考。     

A Generic Framework for Automated Multi-attribute Negotiation

Agents in a negotiation may have to negotiate multiple issues simultaneously. Automated multi-attribute negotiation provides an important mechanism for distributed decision makers to reach agreements on multiple issues. Moreover, it also furnishes the opportunity to reach “win–win” solutions. In this paper, we first provide a survey that synthesizes the research on multi-attribute negotiation. We discuss the limitations of the existing research and conclude that three key issues need further study: incomplete information, Pareto optimality, and tractability. We then present a generic framework for automated multi-attribute negotiation with two new mechanisms that address the above issues. Finally, we discuss the challenges and directions for future work.     

When will payoff maximization survive? An indirect evolutionary analysis

Survival of payoff maximization is the usual as if-justification for assuming rational economic agents. An indirect evolutionary analysis allows for stimuli which are not directly related to reproductive success although they affect behavior. One first determines the solution for all possible constellations of stimuli, and then the evolutionarily stable stimuli. Our general analysis confirms the special results of former studies that payoff maximization in case of commonly known stimuli requires either that own success does not depend on other's behavior or that other's behavior is not influenced by own stimuli. When stimuli are private information, one can derive similar necessary conditions.     

The learning economy and embodied knowledge flows in Great Britain

This paper examines the `learning economy' from the perspective of occupational characteristics and changes in the British labour market between 1980 and 1992. Following a discussion of the learning and knowledge economy, cross-sectional employment data are analysed to ascertain which occupations can be classified as knowledge-based. Longitudinal career history data are then used to trace the flows of these `knowledge workers' over time. Sectoral shifts are examined, with a particular focus on the knowledge-intensive service sectors. The data come from the Employment in Britain survey: a large-scale employee survey from 1992. The approach used allows us to measure somewhat intangible aspects of economic behaviour such as learning and tacit knowledge and attempt to trace their flows. Shifts in knowledge from the manufacturing to the service sector are shown to be important and related to previous work which demonstrated the importance of knowledge intensive business services for both output and productivity in manufacturing.