Brazilian management gurus as reflexive soft-HRM practitioners: an empirical study

This article is an empirical study of Brazilian management gurus, that is, Portuguese-speaking gurus who practise almost wholly in Brazil. It is based on secondary, and primary elite interview data, and finds that Brazilian gurus are reflexive, national-culturally congruent, soft-HRM practitioners, a collective institution working with companies on the implementation of soft-HRM initiatives. Identifying Brazilian gurus in this way is our first contribution. Our second contribution is to provide an empirical account of the very existence and work of these particular national gurus, distinguished from international gurus (like Tom Peters), and not otherwise mentioned in the literature on gurus or soft-HRM. Our third contribution is to present gurus' own understandings of their practice in this soft-HRM role. This they relate to the Brazilian cultural context, and distinguish from that of business schools and motivational speakers. They also identify personally unique characteristics. Our final contribution, taking these three together, is to explore their implications for understandings of HRM, in Brazil and internationally, particularly in relation to the role management gurus.     

The Scottish Tradition in Economics and the Role of Common Sense in Adam Smith's Thought

This essay examines the notion of a 'Scottish Tradition' and the role of common sense in Adam Smith's thought. It is a contribution to the contemporary literature on the 'Scottish Approach' and on the historical investigation of Adam Smith's intellectual background. It argues that a notion of common sense was behind Smith's view of science and that it may provide an epistemological foundation for the Scottish Tradition. The essay attempts to show how the notion of common sense may be seen as a way of emphasising the role of reason and judgement in the conceptualisation of phenomena with pragmatic and aesthetic content.     

The Strategic Industry Supply Curve*

In this paper, we develop the concept of the strategic industry supply curve, representing the locus of Nash equilibrium outputs and prices arising from additive shocks to demand. We show that the standard analysis of partial equilibrium under perfect competition, including the graphical representation of supply and demand, due to Marshall, can be extended to encompass imperfectly competitive markets. Our approach permits a unified treatment of monopoly, oligopoly and competition in linear supply schedules. Further, our model satisfies the five principles of incidence set out by Weyl and Fabinger [2013].     

Funding natural monopoly infrastructure expansion: auctions versus regulated uniform access prices

Journal of Regulatory Economics - This paper characterizes equilibrium behavior in an auction where firms bid a unit price in order to fund and gain access to a new piece of infrastructure. Firms...     

Access pricing and investment: a real options approach

This paper examines a three-period model of an investment decision in a network industry characterized by demand uncertainty, economies of scale and sunk costs. In the absence of regulation we identify the market conditions under which a monopolist decides to invest early as well as the overall welfare generated by this decision. In a regulated environment, we consider a vertically integrated network provider that is required to provide access to downstream competitors and compare two distinct access pricing methodologies: the Efficient Component Pricing Rule (ECPR) and the Option to Delay Pricing Rule (ODPR). We identify the welfare-maximizing access prices using the unregulated market output as a benchmark and show that optimal access regulation depends on market conditions (that is, the nature of demand) with two possible outcomes: (i) access prices that provide a positive payoff to the incumbent, that is, provide a positive compensation to account for the option to delay; and (ii) access prices that yield a zero payoff to the incumbent. Moreover, unlike the earlier literature that argues in favor of an ECPR-type methodology to account for the interaction between irreversibility and demand uncertainty, we find that, except under very specific conditions, an access price that accounts for the option to delay value is welfare-superior to the ECPR.      

Corruption and auctions

We investigate how corruption affects the outcome of a first-price auction (bidding behavior, efficiency and the seller’s expected revenue). The auctioneer approaches the winner to offer the possibility of a reduction in his bid in exchange for a bribe. The bribe can be a percentage of the difference between the winning and the second-highest bid or a fixed amount. We show that there exists a symmetric bidding strategy equilibrium that is monotone, i.e., higher valuation buyers bid higher. Corruption does not affect efficiency but both the auctioneer’s expected bribe and the seller’s expected revenue depend on the format of the bribe payments. We also find the optimal bribe scheme.     

Proper strong-Fibonacci games

We define proper strong-Fibonacci (PSF) games as the subset of proper homogeneous weighted majority games which admit a Fibonacci representation. This is a homogeneous, type-preserving representation whose ordered sequence of type weights and winning quota is the initial string of Fibonacci numbers of the one-step delayed Fibonacci sequence. We show that for a PSF game, the Fibonacci representation coincides with the natural representation of the game. A characterization of PSF games is given in terms of their profile. This opens the way up to a straightforward formula which gives the number \(\varPsi (t)\) of such games as a function of t, number of non-dummy players’ types. It turns out that the growth rate of \(\varPsi (t)\) is exponential. The main result of our paper is that, for two consecutive t values of the same parity, the ratio \(\varPsi (t+2)/\varPsi (t)\) converges toward the golden ratio \({\varPhi }\).     

Auctions with endogenous participation

We study endogenous-participation auctions where bidders only know the number of potential participants. After seeing their values for the object, potential participants decide whether or not to enter the auction. They may not want to enter the auction since they have to pay participation costs. We characterize equilibrium bidding strategies and entry decisions for both first- and second-price sealed-bid auctions when participation is endogenous. We show that there is a pure strategy entry equilibrium where only bidders with values greater than a certain cut-off point actually bid. In this context, both types of auctions generate the same expected revenue. We also show that, contrary to the predictions of the fixed number of bidders literature, the seller's expected revenue may decrease when the number of potential participants increases. In addition, we show that it is optimal for the seller to charge an entry fee, which contrasts with results from the existing literature on auctions with entry. As in the fixed-n literature, we show that first-price auctions generate more expected revenue than second-price auctions when buyers are risk-averse. Finally, we characterize the optimal auction – the auction that maximizes the seller's expected revenue – by using a direct revelation mechanism. The optimal auction involves a reserve price larger than the optimal reserve price in the fixed-n literature. The winner's payment is the second highest bid less the participation cost and losers receive a subsidy equal to the participation cost. Received: 17 August 1998 / 21 September 1999     

Adaptive Preferences and Capabilities: Some Preliminary Conceptual Explorations

The Capability Approach (CA) as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has in part been a response to the problem of adaptive preferences. Their argument says that people might adapt to certain unfavorable circumstances and any self-evaluation in terms of satisfaction or happiness will in this case necessarily be distorted. To evaluate people's well-being in terms of functionings and capabilities guarantees a more objective picture of people's life. Next to this strong criticism on subjective measurements of well-being, we observe an increasing interest in Subjective Well-Being (SWB) or Happiness studies that are included in the broader field of Hedonic Psychology. In this paper, we thus revise the original critique of adaptive preferences and compare it with a more detailed analysis of adaptation as it is presented in hedonic psychology. It becomes clear that adaptation can be a positive as well as a negative phenomenon and that the adaptive preference critique had a particular narrow view on adaptation. However, this does not mean SWB-research is not any longer susceptible to this critique. An alternative way to assess people's subjective well-being, but which could be considered to be more in line with the CA, is proposed by Daniel Kahneman's Objective Happiness. These are all relatively new considerations, especially in economics. Therefore much more research needs to be done on the positive and negative aspects of adaptation to understand its consequences on well-being – especially when evaluated within the capability-space.