The structure of decision schemes with cardinal preferences

This paper replacesGibbard’s (Econometrica 45:665-681, 1977) assumption of strict ordinal preferences by themore natural assumption of cardinal preferences on the set pure social alternatives and we also admit indifferences among the alternatives. By following a similar line of reasoning to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theoremin the deterministic framework, we first show that if a decision scheme satisfies strategy proofness and unanimity, then there is an underlying probabilistic neutrality result which generates an additive coalitional power function. This result is then used to prove that a decision scheme which satisfies strategy proofness and unanimity can be represented as a weak random dictatorship. A weak random dictatorship assigns each individual a chance to be a weak dictator. An individual has weak dictatorial power if the support of the social choice lottery is always a subset of his/her maximal utility set. In contrast to Gibbard’s complete characterization of randomdictatorship, we also demonstrate with an example that strategy proofness and unanimity are sufficient but not necessary conditions for a weak random dictatorship.     

Bribery and inspection technology

The e-government movement advocates increased use of technology to improve government efficiency and reduce corruption by reducing the discretionary power of government officials. This paper studies the relationship between improvements in inspection technology within a Principal-Supervisor-Agent model, where the supervisor is an inspector who is hired by the principal to investigate the agent’s potentially illegal actions. We show that when technology increases the marginal or total productivity of the supervisor’s effort, improvements in inspection technology encourage some types of bribery. Although such technological improvements induce an equilibrium with bribery, compliance and social welfare can still rise. However, when technology and supervisory effort are sufficiently substitutable, improvements in technology may reduce compliance when bribery occurs in equilibrium even when those same technological improvements would have raised compliance in the absence of bribery. We also characterize the relationship between the principal’s socially optimal technology and the anti-corruption policy available to the principal and find that the socially optimal inspection technology may be a substitute for or a complement to the anti-corruption policy. Finally, we show that for any set of policies that optimally induces a no-bribe equilibrium, there exists another set of policies that induces an equilibrium with bribery that is pareto superior to it.     

Information and energy policy preferences: a survey experiment on public opinion about electricity pricing reform in rural India

A common argument for the lack of economic reform in developing countries is popular opposition. If current economic policies are dysfunctional, could information about alternatives sway the voters? We examine if a simple argument emphasizing the need to increase electricity prices for improved supply can change public opinion in the case of India’s power sector reforms. The evidence comes from a survey experiment in rural Uttar Pradesh, which is both India’s largest state and has one of the lowest levels of household electrification. As expected, people respond to information about the relationship between electricity pricing, capacity investment, and reliability of supply by increasing their support for higher prices. However, no corresponding increase is observed for privatization of electricity generation. For external validity, we analyze an existing national survey on electricity privatization conducted in 2004/2005, finding patterns that support our argument.     

Moral management in competitive markets

The intrinsic motivation of a firm’s management for engaging in prosocial behavior is an important determinant of a firm’s social conduct. I provide the first model in which firms run by morally motivated managers engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a competitive setting. Moral management crowds out a competitor’s strategic CSR, increasing profitability and leading shareholders to strategically delegate moral managers, although necessary for socially optimal CSR is that shareholders be morally motivated as well. Shareholders appoint managers that engage in a socially excessive amount of CSR, counter to existing literature, whenever product‐market competition is sufficiently intense.     

Returns to scope: a metric for production synergies demonstrated for hospital production

Knowledge of the production function’s scope properties can provide insights for firms choosing their operating strategy, policy-makers considering industry structure, and analysts determining appropriate tools. We introduce a new property, returns to scope, which is distinct from scale properties and does not rely on price information. Based on desirable characteristics of an estimator of returns to scope, we propose two methods for assessment. We present examples using simulated data and hospital production data from the 2008 National Inpatient Sample of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. We find that hospitals experience negative returns to scope (productivity losses) from the joint production of minor and major diagnostic procedures. Based upon our results we conclude that the new returns to scope property allows sharper insights than classic economies of scope approaches.     

Externalities in a life cycle model with endogenous survival

We study socially vs individually optimal life cycle allocations of consumption and health, when individual health care curbs own mortality but also has a spillover effect on other persons’ survival. Such spillovers arise, for instance, when health care activity at aggregate level triggers improvements in treatment through learning-by-doing (positive externality) or a deterioration in the quality of care through congestion (negative externality). We combine an age-structured optimal control model at population level with a conventional life cycle model to derive the social and private value of life. We then examine how individual incentives deviate from social incentives and how they can be aligned by way of a transfer scheme. The age-patterns of socially and individually optimal health expenditures and the transfer rate are derived. Numerical analysis illustrates the working of our model.     

我国农业调查范围统计及网点问题研究

就当前情况而言,我国越来越依赖于农业统计调查数据信息,这种情况的产生和决策领导高度关注农业问题密不可分,同时还跟中国坚持可持续发展和检验相关政策措施息息相关。我们具体阐述了中国农业开发统计调查范围,并且对怎样依据统计调查收集与农业数据有关的信息进行描述,其中涵盖统计调查机构的演变过程与农业统计调查领域所产生的相关问题研究。以此来说明农业统计调查数据对领导阶层决策的重要性,还对中国统计和抽样调查实施了细致分工。     

The veto mechanism in atomic differential information economies

We establish new characterizations of Walrasian expectations equilibria based on the veto mechanism in the framework of differential information economies with a complete finite measure space of agents. We show that it is enough to consider the veto power of a single coalition, consisting of the entire set of agents, to obtain the Aubin private core. Moreover, we investigate on the veto power of arbitrarily small and big coalitions, providing an extension to mixed markets of well known Schmeidler (1972) and Vind’s (1972) results in terms of Aubin private core allocations.     

On the corporate use of green bonds

When do wholesalers issue green bonds to finance their socially responsible activities instead of charging a premium for the products they produce? We show that in less competitive retail markets when retailers can “skim” more of the premium that end consumers pay for socially responsible products, green bonds provide additional funds to help cover the cost of a wholesaler's socially responsible activities. Similar incentives arise if the wholesaler's input is a small component of the end consumers’ product, or if it is difficult for end consumers to identify the wholesaler's socially responsible activities.     

Organizational political climate: Shared perceptions about the building and use of power bases

Organizational politics continues to be acknowledged as a real and important dimension of organizational functioning. Most research has focused on ‘perceptions of organizational politics’ where organizational politics is conceptualized negatively and its relationship with detrimental individual and organizational outcomes is demonstrated. We argue that organizational politics can be conceptualized as a multi-dimensional climate level construct and that ‘organizational political climate’ can be both functional and dysfunctional. We propose and explain a four dimensional model of organizational political climate informed by existing theoretical perspectives on power bases. The four key dimensions are represented by the building and use of personal power, positional power, connection power and informational power. We also highlight the need for a comprehensive measure of organizational political climate which is underpinned by the four dimensions and which enables an assessment of the extent to which the organizational political climate is functional and/or dysfunctional. In summary, we recommend that HR practitioners seek to understand the functional and dysfunctional dimensions of organizational political climate and implement practices to foster a positive political climate. We overview practical implications for HR managers and suggest a future research agenda.     

Shortlisting procedure with a limited capacity

A decision maker, who is overwhelmed by the number of available alternatives, limits her consideration. We investigate a model where a decision maker’s capacity determines whether she is overwhelmed: She considers all the available alternatives if their number does not exceed her capacity; otherwise, she applies a shortlisting procedure to reduce the number of alternatives to within her capacity. We show how to deduce the decision maker’s capacity, her preference and the alternatives that she considers from the observed behavior. Furthermore, we provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for a consideration function to be derived by the shortlisting procedure with a limited capacity.     

Does organization capital matter? An analysis of the performance implications of CEO power

Chief executive officer (CEO) power reflects the ability of the CEO to influence the firm's decision-making. Whether the CEO of the firm could manage the firm’s investment assets to support maximizing the efficiency of resource allocation is an important issue. As previous studies found, organization capital is a key intangible asset that improves the firm’s production efficiency and affects long-term performance. This study explores how CEO power affects organization capital investments and how it further affects the efficiency of firm resource allocation. We use the following three variables to measure CEO power: CEO founder, CEO-only insider and CEO duality. Our results indicate that the level of CEO power can influence a firm’s value by controlling the organization capital. When the firm’s CEO is also the founder, the CEO will attempt to increase investments in organization capital to create growth opportunities for the firm, which will therefore increase the firm's value. Specifically, when the company is in financial distress, the powerful CEO's increasing in organizational capital investment will expose the company to greater risk of loss of intangible assets. This result may further increase the company's price volatility.     

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Activities and Corporate Governance in Imperfectly Competitive Markets

We investigate the incentives of firms' owners to commit voluntarily to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in an oligopolistic market. The socially responsible attributes attached to products are considered as credence goods, with consumers forming expectations about their existence and level. We show that hiring an ‘individually’ socially responsible CEO and delegating to him the CSR effort and market decisions acts as a commitment device for the firm's owners and credibly signals to consumers that the firm will undertake the ‘missioned’ CSR activities. We also find that CSR activities are welfare enhancing for consumers and firms and thus, they should be encouraged. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Entrepreneurship and Firm Boundaries: The Theory of A Firm

abstract In this paper, we consider how a better understanding of entrepreneurial activities can help explain how firm and industry boundaries change over time and how a more comprehensive understanding of boundary setting can explain where entrepreneurial activities are directed. We start from the premise that while entrepreneurs believe themselves to have superior ideas in one or multiple parts of the value chain, they are characteristically short of cash, and of the ability to convince others to provide it. This premise motivates a simple model in which the entrepreneur has a value‐adding set of ideas for ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ parts of a value chain, as well as for the ways to make these two parts of the value chain work better when joined under unitary control. Assuming that the entrepreneur's objective is to maximize her wealth, we observe that even in the presence of transactional risks or other factors that might make integration preferable to specialization, initial scope depends also on relatively unexplored factors such as (a) how severe the entrepreneur's cash constraint is, and (b) how much value the entrepreneur's ideas add at each part of the value chain. Entrepreneurs will focus on the areas that provide the maximum profit yield per available cash – a criterion which implies that scope choices depend on cash availability and the depth of the demand for the new idea along the value chain. We also note that entrepreneurs make money not only from the operating profits of their firms, but also from the appreciation of the assets the firm has accumulated. This consideration can change the optimal choice of the firms’ boundaries, as entrepreneurs must be sensitive to choosing the segment that will enable them to benefit not only in terms of profit, but also in terms of asset appreciation. We propose that, in the entrepreneurial context especially, it is helpful to focus on the multiple considerations affecting the choice of boundaries for ‘a’ firm – the context faced by an individual entrepreneur – rather than on generic considerations affecting ‘the’ (representative) firm. Scope choices reflect the entrepreneur's own theory of ‘how to make money’.     

Switch or persevere? The effects of experience and metacognition on persistence decisions

This paper extends the scholarly understanding of entrepreneurial persistence decisions by identifying individual-level constructs that moderate which decision criteria have the most influence on entrepreneurs’ persistence decisions. Prior research demonstrates that contextual factors, such as feedback through adversity and the attractiveness of opportunities in an entrepreneur’s environment, determine whether or not an entrepreneur will persist with their current venture. We contribute to this literature by theoretically proposing and empirically testing how individual differences in entrepreneurial experience, metacognitive experience, and metacognitive knowledge moderate which aspects of environmental information entrepreneurs pay the most attention to when deciding whether or not to persist. We test our proposed model using a conjoint experiment that allows for monitoring actual persistence decisions of 124 entrepreneurs. Results suggest that metacognitive knowledge influences persistence decisions primarily through altering the impact that probability of expected outcomes associated with potential alternatives has on entrepreneurs’ persistence decisions. Furthermore, the results provide evidence that more experienced entrepreneurs weigh financial returns and switching costs more heavily when making persistence decisions.     

The revision frequency of earnings forecasts and firm characteristics

This study investigates how the revision frequency of earnings forecasts affects firm characteristics. Previous studies generally focus on the number of analysts following a firm to measure a firm's information environment. The frequency with which news is updated is often defined as an analyst's effort. Analysts provide more information to investors if they update news more frequently. This study examines whether the frequency of information updating for a particular firm affects the firm's performance. We apply three proxies for firm performance: stock liquidity, the cost of equity capital, and firm value. Our findings indicate that the analysts’ effort as measured by the frequency of news updating is effective in providing additional power beyond the number of analysts to represent the information environment of a firm. Therefore, this study suggests that combining both the number of analysts following a firm and the frequency of news updating can be a better proxy for assessing a firm's information environment.     

Persistent and transient cost efficiency—an application to the Swiss hydropower sector

Electricity prices on the European market have decreased significantly over the past few years, resulting in a deterioration of Swiss hydropower firms’ competitiveness and profitability. One option to improve the sector’s competitiveness is to increase cost efficiency. The goal of this study is to quantify the level of persistent and transient cost efficiency of individual firms by applying the generalized true random effects (GTRE) model introduced by Colombi et al. (Journal of Productivity Analysis 42(2): 123–136, 2014) and Filippini and Greene (Journal of Productivity Analysis 45(2): 187–196, 2016). Applying this newly developed GTRE model to a total cost function, the level of cost efficiency of 65 Swiss hydropower firms is analyzed for the period between 2000 and 2013. A true random effects specification is estimated as a benchmark for the transient level of cost efficiency. The results show the presence of both transient as well as persistent cost inefficiencies. The GTREM predicts the aggregate level of cost inefficiency to amount to 21.8% (8.0% transient, 13.8% persistent) on average between 2000 and 2013. These two components differ in interpretation and implication. From an individual firm’s perspective, the two types of cost inefficiencies might require a firm’s management to respond with different improvement strategies. The existing level of persistent inefficiency could prevent the hydropower firms from adjusting their production processes to new market environments. From a regulatory point of view, the results of this study could be used in the scope and determination of the amount of financial support given to struggling firms.     

Cardinality-based equality of opportunities

We study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. We compare profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information provided by two cardinal measures: the number of common alternatives in all sets of a given profile and the difference between the number of alternatives in the individual sets. We also show that, under additional axioms, we can combine these criteria only in a weighted procedure or in some lexicographic refinements of a weighted procedure.      

In Search of ‘Successful’ Accounting Research

This critical commentary on Ohlson's paper (in this issue) problematises the concept of ‘successful’ accounting research; highlighting its ex-post, variable nature as a socially manufactured object. Contrasting Ohlson's notion of a singular body of shared ‘common knowledge’ in accounting with the plurality of knowledges valued by different research communities, the commentary advocates a deliberate courting of heterogeneous research paradigms so as to stimulate insightful scholarship. The commentary also reflects on systemic trends underlying the growth of research measurement programmes, and points out that the quest for ‘successful’ research could perversely undermine the generation of memorable and innovative research. Finally, individual researchers are encouraged at each career stage to determine for themselves the intended results to which they aspire, conscious that there are multiple notions of ‘successful’ research and therefore multiple routes to success.     

Sustainable Development and the Financial System: Society's Perceptions About Socially Responsible Investing

The debate surrounding the financial needs of investors and the impact on society of investment is considered to be an important research topic due to the growth of socially responsible financial markets. The main objective of this research is to study society's perception about socially responsible investing (SRI) and to identify investor's preferences regarding environmental, social and governance criteria, their real‐life investment needs and the most relevant sustainable financial products. To examine society's perception of SRI, we conducted a field survey among Spanish investors. The results show that SRI is at an early stage and Spanish investors need more exact information regarding social, environmental, and governance criteria in order to invest in socially responsible companies and products. This paper offers some guidelines that could be used by Spanish institutions, managers and investors and by foreign managers when approaching the Spanish market, in order to promote the growth of socially responsible financial products. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.