The role of brand utilities: application to buying intention of fair trade products

The authors focus on the ethical consumption and propose a model of buying intention of fair trade products, including the utilities of the fair trade generic brand as direct determinants. The authors measure the functional and symbolic utilities provided by this brand, together with the attitude towards the commercialising organisations, consumer concern and perceived knowledge about fair trade issues. The model is tested through a structural equation model on a sample of members (students, lecturers and staff) of a ‘Fair trade University’. The results confirm that perceived functional utility is the most important antecedent of the buying intention, while the symbolic dimension has a significant but weaker explanatory power. Conversely, the consumer attitude towards the organisation has no influence. The authors also highlight the importance of communication and concern to stimulate consumer behaviour.     

A global database of domestic and international tourist numbers at national and subnational level

We present a new, global database on tourist destinations. The database differs from other databases in that it includes both domestic and international tourists; and it contains, for the most important destinations, data at national level as well as at lower administrative levels. Missing observations are interpolated using statistical models. The data are freely accessible on the internet. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Net exports, consumption volatility and international business cycle models

Conventional two-country RBC models interpret countercyclical net exports as reflecting primarily the dynamics of capital. I show that, quantitatively, theoretical economies rely on counterfactual terms of trade effects: trade fluctuations, on the contrary, are driven by consumption smoothing, thus generating procyclical net trade in goods. I then consider a class of preferences that embeds home production in a reduced form: consumption volatility increases so that countercyclical net exports reflect primarily a strong relation between consumption and imports, as in the data. The major discrepancy between theory and data concerns the variability of international prices.     

The neglected effects of demand characteristics on the sustainability of collusion

According to standard IO models, the parameters that characterize market demand (intercept, slope, and elasticity) and technology (the level of symmetric marginal costs) do not play any role in defining the sustainability of collusive behaviors in Bertrand oligopolies. This paper modifies this counterintuitive result by showing that all of the aforementioned factors do indeed matter when prices are assumed to be discrete rather than continuous. The sign of these effects is clear. Their magnitude varies greatly; i.e., in some cases, it is totally negligible, while in others, it becomes extremely relevant.     

The Irresistible Fetish of Utility Theory: From “Pleasure and Pain” to Rationalising Torture

This note briefly examines the path that the economics discipline has taken since adopting the assumption that human behaviour is exclusively driven by utility maximisation. This view has prevented the full comprehension of most economic phenomena and has spread to other social disciplines, occasionally leading to results either ridiculous or tragic, such as using utility theory to rationalise torture. Such academic absurdity must be ended.     

The Ethics of the Living Wage: A Review and Research Agenda

To date, business ethicists, corporate social responsibility scholars as well as management theorists have been slow to provide a comprehensive and critical scrutiny of the Living Wage concept. The aim of this article, therefore, is to conceptualize the living wage (LW) in its philosophical as well as practical dimensions in order to open up the ethical implications of its introduction and implementation by companies. We set out the legal, socio-institutional and economic contexts for the debates around the LW and review arguments for, and against, it. Key philosophical arguments from the perspectives of sustainability, capability and externality are invoked and discussed in order to demonstrate the issues and challenges involved for companies, state and civil society actors. Relevant examples from the private sector are examined to demonstrate some of the practical issues involved when the LW is introduced by employers. The article also recommends avenues for a research agenda into the LW for business ethicists, CSR and management researchers in contexts such as the UK, where a voluntary, rather than mandatory, approach to the implementation of the LW is adopted.     

Gender-Based Occupational Choices and Family Responsibilities: The Gender Wage Gap in Italy

This paper explores the relationship between the gender division of labor, occupational choices, and the gender wage gap in Italy. In Italy, cultural factors and low availability of formal childcare services define gender roles that are generally based on the male breadwinner model, in which childcare is almost completely entrusted to women. The analysis is carried out through an extension of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition and is based on data from the 2007 Italian National Institute for Workers’ Professional Development (ISFOL). The results are consistent with gender discrimination on wages and suggest that women’s occupational paths are often an outcome of limited choices, and that women’s unpaid domestic work negatively interferes with the energy women can put into paid work. These findings support the need to ensure gender equality in and out of the labor market, especially through deep changes in Italian social norms and through the development of formal childcare.     

Discretionary enforcement and strategic interactions between enforcement agencies and firms: a theoretical and laboratory investigation

This paper presents a game theoretic morphological analysis of the strategic interactions between environmental enforcement authorities and polluting firms. The models explore the role of discretion that such authorities enjoy, either in deciding how to pursue environmental violations (investigative and prosecutorial discretion) or in judging them (judicial discretion). The purpose is to identify both the optimal firms’ behaviour in terms of compliance, and the enforcement authorities’ optimal strategies in terms of enforcement actions to undertake. Consistent with the setting of the game theoretic models, the role of the enforcement agencies in deterring firms from polluting is, then, empirically tested by means of laboratory experiments. Laboratory evidence on compliance behaviour of firms when faced with enforcement conditions predicted by the theoretical models set up is discussed for the different experimental treatments performed. Overall, we suggest that making environmental enforcement less predictable for the firms, and thus creating a degree of uncertainty for the violators, can actually encourage deterrence and, thus, improve compliance. Thus, a partly unpredictable enforcement strategy may generate more compliance than an environmental policy that is known with certainty in advance.     

An Empirical and Theoretical Exploration of Disconnections Between Leadership and Ethics

A comparison of two groups of college students, at a public state university and a private religious school, yields the same results: undergraduates’ interpretations of recent business scandals make distinctions between public and private behavior. Students admire “family men” even when they are caught at fraud. The students’ interpretations illustrate a significant gap in ethical theories: the benefits of a group perspective for corporate citizenship versus individual family values. Most leadership theories, including stakeholder theories, do not address this disjunction. This article describes the phenomenon and maps the ethics literature to locate the dynamic forces underlying the empirical and theoretical disconnections between leadership and ethics.     

Managing business processes across supply networks: the role of coordination mechanisms

The theory of network coordination provides a theoretical basis to explain how companies can overcome organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage business processes across supply networks. In particular, this paper focuses on Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR), a collaboration process whereby supply chain trading partners activate inter-firm coordination mechanisms to jointly plan key supply chain activities, from production and delivery of raw materials to production and delivery of final products to end customers.By discussing three case studies of CPFR implementation in supply networks of different industries–i.e. pharmaceutical, automotive and mechanical–the paper provides a theoretical framework that contributes to explaining the relations between inter-firm coordination mechanisms and the characteristics of interdependence among the actors involved in CPFR implementation.