The Silent Samaritan Syndrome: Why the Whistle Remains Unblown

Whistle blowing programs have been central to numerous government, legislative, and regulatory reform efforts in recent years. To protect investors, corporate boards have instituted numerous measures to promote whistle blowing. Despite significant whistle blowing incentives, few individuals blow the whistle when presented with the opportunity. Instead, individuals often remain fallaciously silent and, in essence, become passive fraudsters themselves. Using the fraud triangle and models of moral behavior, we model and analyze fallacious silence and identify factors that may motivate an individual to rationalize fallacious silence. We use a survey of graduate accounting students to test hypothesized factors that contribute to fallacious silence rationalizations in an academic setting. We find evidence that the ability to rationalize fallacious silence is related to community influences and personal traits such as awareness and moral competence.     

The effect of rankings on honesty in budget reporting

We conduct an experiment to investigate the effect of rankings, which are pervasive in practice, on the honesty of managers’ budget reports, which is important for sound decision making in organizations. Participants in our experiment are ranked in one of four ways: (1) firm profit, (2) own compensation, (3) both firm profit and own compensation, and (4) randomly, which serves as our baseline condition. None of the rankings affect participants’ remuneration. Compared to our baseline (random rankings) setting, where participants indeed exhibit honesty concerns, we find that rankings based on firm profit significantly increase honesty and that rankings based on own compensation significantly decrease honesty. Participants who received both rankings were significantly more honest than participants in the own compensation rankings condition. We did not, however, find significant differences in honesty between the both rankings and firm profit rankings conditions. As such, participants in the both rankings condition seemed to focus more on the firm profit metric than on the financially congruent own compensation metric. We also find that our results are stable across periods, suggesting that the effects of rankings neither increased nor dissipated over time. We discuss the contributions of our study and concomitant findings to accounting research and practice.     

Shopping orientations of US males: A generational cohort comparison

Male shoppers are recognized as an important and distinctive market segment. While initial steps to categorize and classify male shoppers have been taken, the majority of existing empirical research considers male shoppers as a single, homogeneous market segment. Recognizing that our understanding of male shoppers can be improved by identifying smaller, more homogeneous sub-segments, this exploratory study uses Generational Cohort Theory (GCT) as a framework to examine the shopping orientations of US men across four different generational cohorts: the Silent generation, the Baby Boomers, the 13th Generation, and the Millennials. The findings of this study support the use of GCT as a market segmentation tool for male shoppers and provide insight to help retailers understand how men in the four cohort groups approach shopping. Specifically, the findings suggest that male shoppers in the Millennial generation exhibit significantly higher levels of shopping enjoyment, recreational shopping tendency and market mavenism than males in the other generational cohorts.     

Understanding information propagation on online social tagging systems: a case study on Flickr

Online social networking services (SNS) have been regarded as one of the most powerful online communication channels to propagate information to other users. It means that the online social networking services are providing users with efficient features (e.g., searching, managing and visualizing new information). It is important for many online collaborative applications to understand how the information can be propagated via such social media. Thus, we want to focus on a social tagging system (e.g., Flickr) where users can easily exchange resources as well as their tags. In this paper, given a certain tag, a social pulse can be established by counting (i) the number of users and (ii) the number of resources over time. More importantly, we assume that information can be propagated by (iii) inducibility from other tags by comparing social pulses. To conduct experimentation, a tag-based searching system (called Tagoole) has been implemented to collect a dataset from Flickr.     

Joint determination of biological encephalization,economic specialization

In this paper, we develop a paleoeconomic model of the co-evolution of economic specialization and encephalization—the common physiological measure of intelligence as reflected by brain mass relative to total body mass. Our economic analysis links ecological and social intelligence theories of increased encephalization in early hominins through a model in which both economic and ecological feedbacks jointly determined the evolutionary incentives. We focus on degrees of specialization affected by coordination costs with and without market exchange. Our results suggest encephalization would be a process characterized by diminishing returns to behavioral advances. In terms of the long-running debate in economics over whether specialization increases or decreases intelligence, our results suggest from an evolutionary perspective the answer depends on economic/social institutions and how these influence ecological interactions.     

Skyscrapers and the Skyline: Manhattan, 1895–2004

This article investigates the market for skyscrapers in Manhattan from 1895 to 2004. Clark and Kingston (1930) have argued that extreme height is a result of profit maximization, while Helsley and Strange (2008) posit that skyscraper height can be caused, in part, by strategic interaction among builders. I provide a model for the market for building height and the number of completions, which are functions of the market fundamentals and the desire of builders to stand out in the skyline. I test this model using time series data. I find that skyscraper completions and average heights over the 20th century are consistent with profit maximization; the desire to add extra height to stand out does not appear to be a systematic determinant of building height.     

THE EVOLUTION OF COMPETITIVENESS IN HUNGARIAN AGRICULTURE: FROM TRANSITION TO ACCESSION

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -