A Survey of Managers’ Perceptions of Corporate Ethics and Social Responsibility and Actions that may Affect Companies’ Success

This exploratory study examines how managers and professionals regard the ethical and social responsibility reputations of 60 well-known Australian and International companies, and how this in turn influences their attitudes and behaviour towards these organisations. More than 350 MBA, other postgraduate business students, and participants in Australian Institute of Management (Western Australia) management education programmes were surveyed to evaluate how ethical and socially responsible they believed the 60 organisations to be. The survey sought to determine what these participants considered ‘ethical’ and ‘socially responsible’ behaviour in organisations to be. The survey also examined how the participants’ beliefs influenced their attitudes and intended behaviours towards these organisations. The results of this survey indicate that many managers and professionals have clear views about the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies. This affects their attitudes towards these organisations which in turn has an impact on their intended behaviour towards them. These findings support the view in other research studies that well-educated managers and professionals are, to some extent, taking into account the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies when deciding whether to work for them, use their services or buy shares in their companies.     

Perceptions regarding strategic and structural entry barriers

This article uses factor analysis to identify the underlying dimensions of strategic and structural entry barriers. We find that, in the perception of firms, both types of barriers are important and that the effectiveness of strategic barriers depends on attributes of the market structure. Based on the seven generic factors, a conjoint analysis is carried out to identify the most important factors perceived by firms. The conjoint analysis shows that in particular the barriers rooted in three underlying dimensions require attention of market authorities as they may prevent new entrants from entry: capital, access to distribution channels and strategic action. Remarkably, government rules and regulations, product differentiation, research and development (R&D) and advertising constitute minor entry problems according to firms.     

Examining Federal Impact Aid's Reimbursement for Local School Districts

In 1950, Congress created the Federal Impact Aid Program to compensate local school districts for lost tax revenue or increased burdens resulting from federal activities, including the placement of military bases within school districts. Currently, Impact Aid provides nearly $1 billion per year in subsidies to approximately 1400 local school districts that enroll over 1.2 million eligible children. This current study examines the adequacy of the funding in the Impact Aid program as an example of how the existing public finance literature provides the tools to help policy makers make informed decisions. (JEL H0 , H7 , 12 )     

Negotiating the spirit of the deal

Most experienced negotiators are comfortable working out the terms of an economic contract--they bargain for the best price, haggle over equity splits, and finesse detailed exit clauses. Yet these same seasoned professionals spend so much time ironing out the letter of the deal that they often pay little attention to the spirit of the deal--the social contract. And that can lead to major problems, say the authors, because even though the parties agree to the same terms on paper, they may have very different expectations about how to meet them. Those on one side, for instance, might think they're entering into a long-term partnership, while those on the other believe they're simply making a series of discrete transactions. Because the parties have failed to have a true meeting of the minds, they sign a deal that is likely to fall apart. To avoid such a disastrous outcome, negotiators should explicitly discuss the details of their social contract before inking the deal. They should talk about the underlying social contract, which answers the question, What? For instance, what is the real nature, extent, and duration of the agreement? And they should discuss the ongoing social contract, which answers the question, How? For instance, in practice, how will we make decisions, handle unforeseen events, communicate with one another, and resolve disputes? Drawing on real-life examples, the authors explore the problems that arise when the letter and spirit of the deal are at odds and suggest ways to dovetail them so they are both independently strong and mutually reinforcing. They also highlight risk factors that can lead to misunderstandings and expose common misperceptions about the social contract.     

Permanent income in general equilibrium

This paper reviews recent tests of the permanent income hypothesis. This literature suggests that consumption is ‘too sensitive’ to current income, relative to the predictions of the usual (partial equilibrium) model. It is then argued that in general equilibrium, attempts to move along a consumption possibilities frontier exhibiting diminishing returns would naturally give rise to endogenous changes in interest rates, creating a link between consumption and current income. A fully specified general equilibrium example is introduced which does indeed exhibit the same ‘excess sensitivity’ reported in the literature, for precisely this reason.     

Strong Equilibrium in Congestion Games

[6]introduced the class of congestion games and proved that they always possess a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies. Here we obtain conditions for the existence of a strong equilibrium in this class of games, as well as for the equivalence of Nash and strong equilibria. We also give conditions for uniqueness and for Pareto optimality of the Nash equilibrium. Except for a natural monotonicity assumption on the utilities, the conditions are expressed only in terms of the underlying congestion game form. It turns out that avoiding a certain type of bad configuration in the strategy spaces is essential to positive results.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C71, C72, D62.     

An extension of Fishburn's theorem on extending orders

P. C. Fishburn [J. Econom. Theory31 (1983), 000-000] has shown that one can extend any well ordering of a set to a linear ordering of the set of all non-empty subsets of that set, while satisfying two axioms denoted (GP¹) and (M¹). By applying the compactness theorem of logic, this note shows that the well ordering assumption can be waived. Definability and well ordering properties of the extension are also discussed and shown to depend on the class of basic orderings considered.     

Penetration of industrial country markets by agricultural products from developing countries

About 55% of food and about 60% of non-food agricultural exports of the developing countries are sold in industrial country markets. Market access is therefore important.While the developing countries have been able to increase the market penetration of their manufactured exports in industrial countries at a remarkable rate of about 8% in the 1970s, market penetration in agricultural commodities has generally been less successful.From 1970 to 1980 the developing countries were able to increase their market penetration in processed agricultural commodities from 3.5 to 3.7%, which amounts to an average annual increase of only 0.6%. In basic agricultural products like sugar, maize, tomatoes and beef they even incurred losses in their market share that corresponded to an increase in the degree of self-sufficiency (and probably of protective trade barriers) of the industrial countries, in particular the EC.