There is relevance in the classroom: Analysis of present methods of teaching business ethics

In 1988 the Journal of Business Ethics published a paper by David Mathison entitled Business Ethics Cases and Decision Models: A Call for Relevancy in the Classroom. Mathison argued that the present methods of teaching business ethics may be inappropriate for MBA students. He believes that faculty are teaching at one decision-making level and that students are and will be functioning on another (lower) level. The purpose of this paper is to respond to Mathison's arguments and offer support for the present methods and materials used to teach Master level ethics classes. The support includes suggested class discussion ideas and assignments.Victoria K. Strong is a graduate student at Bentley College. She returned to school to pursue a Master of Science in Accountancy after working in the engineering profession for 12 years. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1984. Her business experience includes positions as Mechanical Design Engineer and Unit Supervisor of an engineering development laboratory. Alan N. Hoffman is an Associate Professor of Management at Bentley College. He received his DBA from Indiana University. Dr. Hoffman's writing has been published in the Academy of Management Journal and Human Relations.The authors would like to thank Carolyn Colt and the entire spring 1988 MG520-class for their valuable contributions.     

Vying for time. Work and family

Time--there is never enough of it. There are never enough hours in the day to do everything at work and at home. Today's employees, forced to choose between work obligations and family responsibilities, often feel frazzled and guilty. Some employers recognize these conflicts and are finding ways to lighten the work/family load. They are offering a sophisticated combination of dependent-care options, flexible work hours and family-related benefits tailored to meet the needs of the employees within their specific industries. HRMagazine looks at leaders in six major industries--manufacturing, health, communications/technology, financial management, government and retail. No one can give employees that 25-hour day that everyone feels they need to juggle all their work and family obligations. But these industry leaders have provided a nurturing environment where employees can successfully balance those obligations.     

Common pool resources and contextual factors: Evolution of a fishermen's cooperative in Calcutta

The CPR school has successfully rebutted Hardin's pessimistic Tragedy of the Commons model. However, in recent years, critics have focussed on the inward orientation and lack of contextual analysis characterising the writings of the CPR school.Oakerson [A Model for the analysis of common property problems. Working Paper R86-13. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, 1986] and Ostrom [Governing the Commons. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990] have detailed the list of variables that have to be studied to understand the mechanics of collective action. However, these factors are internal to the community. Recent critics' point out that the actions of individual agents are also influenced by the alternatives embedded outside the system. These variables are collectively labelled contextual factors.In our paper, we have analysed the case of a fishermen's cooperative in the Calcutta Metropolitan District to show how the historic and economic context shapes targets of resource users and affects the feasibility of alternative courses to achieve the target by determining opportunity and transaction costs of actions. This indicates the importance of contextual factors in explaining the formation and evolution of the resource regime.     

A theory of persistent income inequality

This paper explores the dynamics of income inequality by studying the evolution of human capital investment and neighborhood choice for a population of families. Parents affect the conditional probability distribution of their children's income through the choice of a neighborhood in which to live. Neighborhood location affects children both through local public finance of education as well as through sociological effects. These forces combine to create incentives for wealthier families to segregate themselves into economically homogeneous neighborhoods. Economic stratification combines with strong neighborhoodwide feedback effects to transmit economic status across generations, leading to persistent income inequality.     

Punishment,counterpunishment and sanction enforcement in a social dilemma experiment

We present the results of an experiment that explores the sanctioning behavior of individuals who experience a social dilemma. In the game we study, players choose contribution levels to a public good and subsequently have multiple opportunities to reduce the earnings of the other members of the group. The treatments vary in terms of individuals’ opportunities to (a) avenge sanctions that have been directed toward themselves, and (b) punish others’ sanctioning behavior with respect to third parties. We find that individuals do avenge sanctions they have received, and this serves to decrease contribution levels. They also punish those who fail to sanction third parties, but the resulting increase in contributions is smaller than the decrease the avenging of sanctions induces. When there are five rounds of unrestricted sanctioning, contributions and welfare are significantly lower than when only one round of sanctioning opportunities exists, and welfare is lower than at a benchmark of zero cooperation. We thank James Andreoni, participants in seminars at Emory University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney, Deakin University, the 2004 North American Regional Meetings of the ESA in Tucson, Arizona, USA, the 2004 IMEBE Meetings in Cordoba, Spain, and the 2005 SAET meetings in Vigo, Spain, for constructive and helpful comments. We thank Elven Priour for programming and organization of the sessions. Instructions for the experiment are available from the authors.     

Delegation and polarization of platforms in political competition

Summary. We consider a model of political competition among two ideological parties who are uncertain about the distribution of voters. The distinguishing feature of the model is that parties can delegate electoral decisions to candidates by nomination. It is shown that if the credible platform commitments of the candidates is feasible, then at least one of the parties nominates in equilibrium to a candidate who has an ideology that is more radical than the delegating party's ideology. In a variety of circumstances, this, in turn, yields a polarization of equilibrium policy choices of the candidates. It is thus argued formally here that strategic nomination of the candidates may well be one of the major reasons behind the well documented observation that the platforms associated with the political parties in two-party democracies are often surprisingly polarized. Received: January 10, 2002; revised version: May 8, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We thank Alberto Alesina, Levent Ko?kesen, Antonio Merlo, Ronny Razin, Vijay Krishna, Alessandro Lizzeri, and seminar participants at Alicante, Columbia, Copenhagen, and NYU for helpful comments. We also thank an anonymous referee for its useful suggestions. A good fraction of this research was conducted while Ok was a visitor in the Department of Economics at University of Alicante; he thanks for the kind hospitality of this institution. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grant CICYT BEC2001-0535 (Faulí-Oller) and BEC2001-0980 (Ortu?o-Ortín). Correspondence to:I. Ortu?o-Ortin     

Self-enforcing international environmental agreements with a stock pollutant

In this paper the stability of an International Environmental Agreement (IEA) among N identical countries that emit a pollutant are studied using a two-stage game. In the first stage each country decides noncooperatively whether or not to join an IEA, and in the second stage signatories jointly against nonsignatories determine their emissions in a dynamic setting defined in continuous time. A numerical simulation shows that a bilateral coalition is the unique self-enforcing IEA independently of the gains coming from cooperation and the kind of strategies played by the agents (open-loop or feedback strategies). We have also studied the effects of a minimum participation clause finding that for this case a self-enforcing IEA just consists of the number of countries established in the clause.JEL Classification: C73, D62, Q28 Corresponding author : Santiago J. RubioThis paper is based on chapter four of Begoña Casinos Ph. Dissertation. Financial support from the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under grant BEC2000-1432 and Fundación BBVAis gratefully acknowledged. We also appreciate the helpful comments of three anonymous referees, whose suggestions improved the paper. Regarding any remaining inadequacies, the usual caveat applies.     

Cost Heterogeneity and the Potential Savings from Market-Based Policies

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the potential cost savings associated with market-based policies, with an application to the environmental policy realm. These simple formulae can identify instruments that merit more detailed investigation. We illustrate the use of these results with an application to nitrogen oxides control by electric utilities in the United States.     

COMMON PROPERTY AS AN INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE TO ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABILITY

Relationships between the potential productivity of land and property rights generally are couched in terms of measures of central tendency or means. However, risk or variance as a measure of uncertainty also is critical in relating property rights and organizational arrangements developed within various property regimes. Meteorological and hydrological research results support the appropriateness of risk-spreading property regimes, especially in semi-arid and arid lands. Spatial diversification models indicate that common property regimes can be a rational response to environmental variability. Efforts by the public sector to privatize and fence grazing lands on the extensive margin may have limited appeal to pastoralists throughout the world .