Development of Norms Through Compliance Disclosure

This article introduces compliance disclosure regimes to business ethics research. Compliance disclosure is a relatively recent regulatory technique whereby companies are obliged to disclose the extent to which they comply with codes, ‘best practice standards’ or other extra-legal texts containing norms or prospective norms. Such ‘compliance disclosure’ obligations are often presented as flexible regulatory alternatives to substantive, command-and-control regulation. However, based on a report on experiences of existing compliance disclosure obligations, this article will identify major weaknesses that prevent them from becoming effective mechanisms to discipline a certain type of behaviour. It will be argued that regulatory recourse to compliance disclosure obligations is nonetheless worthwhile if we view them as mechanisms that can initiate a dialogue about norm interpretation, application and norm desirability. From this perspective, compliance disclosure obligations serve less to discipline companies by making corporate practices transparent, and more to trigger a process of norm development, in which the law, companies and their stakeholders interact. This article provides an illustration of how mandatory disclosure, if it is restricted to a unilateral communication process, may produce no effective results (or even prove counterproductive), whilst highlighting the alternative potential of disclosure as an initiator of dialogue, supported by laws, geared towards the development and refinement of norms applicable to business in a global context and the values they promote.     

What characterizes Chinese consumer behavior? A cross-industry analysis of the Chinese diaspora in Japan

In order to profit from China??s enormous business opportunities, international firms need to know Chinese consumer preferences. To learn more about intrinsic Chinese consumer preferences and their distinction from other Asian consumer preferences, this study analyzes differences in the formation of customer satisfaction, repurchase intent, and word-of-mouth intent between Chinese-born and locally born consumers in Japan. Verifying culture-based hypotheses, cross-industry analyses show that Chinese-born consumers pay less attention to the public brand image and risk-related switching costs, but more attention to quality expectations, perceived value, experienced usefulness, and financial switching costs than Japanese consumers. Marketing strategies should account for these preference structures.     

Project Decision Chain

To add value to project performance and help obtain project success, a new framework for decision making in projects is defined. It introduces the project decision chain inspired by the supply chain thinking in the manufacturing sector and uses three types of decisions: authorization, selection, and plan decision. A primitive decision element is defined where all the three decision types can be accommodated. Each task in the primitive element can in itself contain subtasks that in turn will comprise new primitive elements. The primitive elements are nested together in a project decision chain.     

Decision-making in competitive framings—Strategic behavior of chess players in mini-ultimatum game chess puzzles

We introduce a competitive framing in the mini-ultimatum game utilizing chess puzzles. Therein, our chess playing participants accept low offers significantly more often compared to a neutral framing. We conclude that in familiar competitive surroundings egoistic behavior is more acceptable.     

Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development: 100 years of development

This article sheds light on the impact of Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development over the last 100?years, and identifies insights from that work that are less well-known, but that have the potential for informing current developments in evolutionary economics. We identify these insights by tracing the development of Schumpeter’s ideas in Theory of Economic Development, which he revised heavily between the first and second German and the English editions. We not only report material lost in the process and developments in Schumpeter’s thinking that can be read off of the revisions, but also indicate how the newfound material can inform and inspire evolutionary economics today.     

Family background and income during the rise of the welfare state: Brother correlations in income for Swedish men born 1932–1968

We investigate if the association between family background and income in Sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968. Our main finding is that the share of the variance in long-run income that is attributable to family background, the so-called brother correlation in income, has fallen by some 17% from 0.49 for the cohorts of brothers born in the early 1930s to below 0.32 for the cohorts born around 1950. From then on, the correlations have inched back up to around 0.37. We report suggestive evidence that the decline is driven by changes in education.     

EFFECTIVE RATES OF ASSISTANCE FOR NORWEGIAN INDUSTRIES

We measure the effective assistance to 24 Norwegian private industries in 1989 and 1991 from government budgetary subsidies, indirect commodity taxes, import protection through nominal tariffs and non-tariff barriers, and electricity market distortions. The assistance effects are measured by the change in the net-of-tax value added price due to a removal of the policy measures considered. Most industries were effectively assisted, but the effective assistance differs widely between industries, indicating the overall distortive effect on the industry structure. Agriculture, Food Processing and Manufacture of Beverages and Tobacco stand out as the most assisted industries. Budgetary subsidies and non-tariff barriers had the strongest effective assistance effect.