Characterization of the Row Geometric Mean Ranking with a Group Consensus Axiom

An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of extracting a ranking of the alternatives from a pairwise comparison ratio matrix. The ordering induced by row geometric mean method is proved to be uniquely determined by three independent axioms, anonymity (independence of the labelling of alternatives), responsiveness (a kind of monotonicity property) and aggregation invariance, which requires the preservation of group consensus, that is, the pairwise ranking between two alternatives should remain unchanged if unanimous individual preferences are combined by geometric mean.     

Female Representation on Corporate Boards in Europe: The Interplay of Organizational Social Consciousness and Institutions

Journal of Business Ethics - We examine the role of alignment between organizational social consciousness and the informal and formal institutions of a country in increasing female representation...     

Fixed-Term Contracts and Labor Market Duality in France

The French labor market is segmented between permanent and temporary workers. The second category has difficulty in getting an open-ended contract. This paper aims at depicting workers on short-term contracts and shows the consequences on their professional career are negative and significant. A large part of the wage gap between permanent and temporary workers remains unexplained by observable characteristics. They receive less on-the-job training and their likelihood of obtaining a stable job is lower than 30% after 1 year and a half. They have also a higher probability of being the adjustment variable in case of an economic negative shock. These different findings show the importance of using public policies to encourage transitions from fixed-term to permanent employment and reducing labor-market duality.     

Non-GAAP reporting following debt covenant violations

Review of Accounting Studies - We investigate whether firms change their non-GAAP reporting practices after debt covenant violations. We find that the likelihood that a firm will disclose non-GAAP...     

Bagging bundle benefits in broadband and media mergers: Lessons from Sky/Vodafone for antitrust analysis

The historic precedents in telecommunications antitrust findings have tended towards finding harm to competition when network operators integrate downstream and bundle the provision of applications and services. The reason for this is that market power in network provision is thought to be extended into the applications market(s). More recently however, proposed mergers have been between telecommunications and media distribution firms, both of whom have some degree of market power, already sell their own services in bundles, and who may or may not have been offering combined bundles already via contractual agreements. Examples include Sky/Vodafone in New Zealand, and Time Warner/AT&T in the United States as well as Vodafone/Unitymedia in Germany and Media Capital/Altice in Portugal. These complex proposed arrangements pose challenges to competition authorities, whose legal and procedural rules and precedents, especially those defining the relevant markets affected by the merger or vertical integration activity, have been developed from the analysis of simpler cases. These precedents may not be sufficient to analyse current cases, characterized by multiple products catering to heterogeneous consumer preferences, and consumers are not constrained to buying only one variant of the products in each of the upstream and downstream markets.We illustrate the challenges by way of a case study of the proposed merger between Sky and Vodafone, declined by the New Zealand Commerce Commission in February 2017. Limitations in existing market definition processes and the evaluation of market power where bundling already occurs risk overlooking complex demand-side interactions that influence the profitability and efficiency of various structural and contractual strategic choices. We propose that classic merger and antitrust analysis based on econometric cost-benefit analysis can be augmented by using simulation and numerical analysis of a range of bundle offers expected to be relevant in decision-making. We develop a simple model and use it to illustrate how it may be used to inform broadband and content mergers, and other complex antitrust cases, such the assessment of the effects of two-sided markets and firm pricing decisions.     

A New Regulatory Paradigm for the Digital Sector in Europe

The new regulatory framework in the digital sector in Europe is likely to fall short of expectations. A fragmented digital market with insuffi cient incentives for investment is the probable outcome. European regulators should abandon their approach in favour of a new and more flexible set of ideas discussed in this paper.     

Integrated bio-economic models as tools to support land-use decision making: a review of potential and limitations

Bio-economic modelling has become a useful tool for anticipating the outcomes of policies and technologies before their implementation. Advances in mathematical programming have made it possible to build more comprehensive models. In an overview of recent studies about bio-economic models applied to land-use problems in agriculture and forestry, we evaluated how aspects such as uncertainty, multiple objective functions, system dynamics and time have been incorporated into models. We found that single objective models were more frequently applied at the farm level, while multiple objective modelling has been applied to meet concerns at the landscape level. Among the objectives, social aspects are seldom represented in all models, when being compared to economic and environmental aspects. The integration of uncertainty is occasionally a topic, while stochastic approaches are more frequently applied than non-stochastic robust methods. Most multiple-objective models do not integrate uncertainty or sequential decision making. Static approaches continue to be more recurrent than truly dynamic models. Even though integrating multiple aspects may enhance our understanding of a system; it involves a tradeoff between complexity and robustness of the results obtained. Land-use models have to address this balance between complexity and robustness in order to evolve towards robust multiple-objective spatial optimization as a prerequisite to achieve sustainability goals.     

Information and Knowledge as Antecedents of Consumer Attitudes and Intentions to Buy and Recommend Fair-Trade Products

The authors propose and empirically test a causal model to understand how the availability of fair-trade information and consumer knowledge about this issue affect consumers’ attitudes and intentions toward fair-trade products. The model is built upon the attitude-behavior paradigm and the premises of agency theory. It is tested through structural equation modeling with a sample of 292 Spanish consumers. The findings are that consumers do not have good knowledge about fair trade and that this is significantly determined by the lack of information about this in the market. It is also observed that consumers’ perceptions about the availability of fair-trade information have negative effects on their concern about this issue and that such information as is available is not effective in reducing consumer skepticism. The research represents an extension of previous fair-trade literature because the role of information and communication in improving consumer attitudes and buying intentions has rarely been explored in the case of ethical products.     

Auditors,Specialists, and Professional Jurisdiction in Audits of Fair Values

Auditors frequently use valuation specialists to help them evaluate fair values, but researchers and regulators know little about how auditors use these specialists. Based on interviews with 28 auditors and 14 valuation specialists, I develop a theoretical framework informed by expert systems and professional competition theories. The interviews suggest that institutional pressures in the fair value environment unevenly impact auditors and specialists, causing tension between auditors' needs for ontological security and jurisdictional claims. This tension leads to one-sided competition between auditors and specialists and incomplete acceptance of specialists' work. Auditors' competitive behaviors coupled with this incomplete acceptance result in a tendency to make specialists' work conform to auditors' views. Collectively, these findings suggest that auditors use specialists as an institutional mechanism to create comfort, but not insight. This study links expert systems and professional competition theories, and it provides critical insight into some assumptions underlying tenets of each theory. It also informs researchers, regulators, and practitioners interested in understanding and addressing problems related to the use of specialists.     

Some issues in blockchain for accounting and the supply chain,with an application of distributed databases to virtual organizations

This paper reviews some recent blockchain‐based applications for information capture, distribution and preservation. As part of that review, this paper examines two key concerns with current blockchain designs for accounting and supply chain transactions: data independence and multiple semantic models for the same information distribution problem. Blockchain applications typically integrate database, application and presentation tiers all in the same ledger. This results in a general inability to query information in the ledger and other concerns. Further, since most applications appear to be private blockchain applications, there is a concern of agents needing to accommodate multiple blockchains depending on who their trading partners are and what they request. Finally, this paper uses a distributed database to design a ‘blockchain‐like’ system for virtual organizations.