Business Ethics in the Former Soviet Union: A Report

Transition from a planned command economy to a market economy means tearing down a socio-economic setting where everybody follows orders and nobody bears individual responsibility for anything. The absence of personal responsibility does not promote ethical behavior in any walk of life. Today, the malnourished business ethics in the former Soviet Union creates a critical obstacle to economic development. The paucity of new official rules governing the conduct of business makes the transition process painful and difficult to people habituated to numberless rules and regulations. The first part of this paper surveys the most visible unethical business practices that have been reported by the Western media and those that are causing the largest number of complaints by the local governments and businessmen. The second part of the paper looks at ethical problems that have been under-reported.     

Loglinear model for analysis of cross-tabulated coal mine injury data

Mine accidents/injuries can be cross-classified against the variables of interest in a contingency table and their associations can be assessed through aggregate statistics. However, there is a need to develop a coherent and structured procedure for analysis of accident data, which will allow one to identify associations between two or more variables multivariately. In this study, the loglinear model, which has been proposed as a mathematical representation of the contingency table, was applied to accident data from a group of coal mines to assess the associations/interactions between two or more variables multivariately through their main and interaction effects. The case study results revealed that the variables ‘occupation’ and ‘workplace location’ were highly associated with degree of injury. It was also clearly indicated that the workers with more than 20 years of experience exhibited high injury rate patterns. While designing training programs for miners, focused attention should be given to specific categories of workers to reduce accident/injuries at the case study mines.     

THE IMPACT OF INFLATION ON PRICES RECEIVED AND PAID BY GREEK FARMERS

This paper investigates empirically the impact of inflation on the terms of trade, prices received and paid, for Greek farmers in the period 1967–87. According to conventional theory, inflation can have a non-neutral effect if it is unanticipated and if prices received and paid by farmers exhibit different degrees of flexibility. However, in the case where prices are administered, inflation neutrality depends on government's policy objectives and ability to adjust prices of inputs and outputs to the rate of inflation. The empirical investigation undertaken in this study shows that pricing policies implemented by the Greek government have resulted in neutralising the impact of inflation on the terms of trade for Greek farmers. Furthermore, the observed significant variability of the terms of trade can be attributed solely to real demand and supply factors.     

A Development‐friendly Prioritisation of Doha Round Proposals

Agriculture looms large on the WTO's agenda. It was the first substantive item listed in the work programme of the Ministerial Declaration launching the Doha Round, and it was arguably at the centre of the failure at Cancun. Developing countries made it clear both before and during the Cancun meeting that progress on agriculture was their primary objective. Negotiations in other areas have received less attention and progressed more slowly. This paper considers that prioritisation, and suggests that the interests of developing countries in the current round of trade negotiations are much broader than is suggested by the narrow range of agricultural issues that have dominated negotiations. A true development round would require a significant reprioritisation of many areas of the WTO's current agenda.     

Who are these people? Personality traits and judgments about trade secret misappropriation in post‐employment activities

Trade secret theft is a problem that almost all organizations face. The greatest threat is employee mobility and potential unethical post‐employment behavior. This study investigates the role of individual personality traits in judgments about trade secret misappropriation. Our hypotheses were tested in three studies addressing three different situational contexts: current employees, employees about to be laid off, and students who had quit their job. Relationships were estimated with robust regression. The results show that some personality traits predict judgment about another person's trade secret misappropriation, and that the situational context in which individuals formulate their ethical judgment moderates the impact of personality traits on ethical judgment.     

Measuring the sustainability of a community safety promotion network: working from the inside out

Mackay Whitsunday Safe Communities (MWSC) was developed using a capacity building model that consciously attempted to design sustainability into the network. Our aim was to quantify the flow of resources used by MWSC to implement and sustain its injury control activities. Resource exchange among network members was quantified and analysed using social network analysis. In 2004, MWSC accessed an estimated 6.5 full-time staff equivalents and $0.9 million. However, these resources were largely accessed externally. The linking relationships that connected MWSC to its external support network, more than half of which were maintained by six broker network facilitators, were the critical social asset used to access resources and sustain network productivity. The sustainability of this network and arguably similar safety promotion networks is vulnerable to the changing priorities of external sponsoring agents and highly dependent on its leaders who facilitated access to the resources it required to remain productive.     

Control of lipid oxidation in cooked ground beef with water and salts*

The effects of exogenous water and salts on lipid oxidation in ground beef were determined. Deionized water, salts, or both, were added to treatment samples. Salts used were sodium chloride, potassium chloride and sodium sulphate, all at 3% concentration. The Thiobarbituric acid (TBA) test was used to assess lipid oxidation. Addition of water at a 10% or 20% level had no effect on rancidity. Sodium chloride and potassium chloride reduced TBA numbers. Adding water to those samples containing potassium chloride and sodium sulphate raised moisture content.     

Britt,Steuart Henderson. Psychological Principles of Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Lexington,Mass.: Lexington Books, 1978

Abstract

Conventionally, an advertiser's spending on the creative component of an advertising campaign is small in relation to the media budget and is channeled exclusively to a single advertising agency. Gross challenged those conventions more than 20 years ago, using a mathematical model of advertising effectiveness. His model suggested spending more on the creative component and doing so in a competition among several independent sources. The model assumed a normal distribution of effectiveness of advertisements. Data on response to consumer product ads show that the distribution of effectiveness is not normal, but quite skewed. Using Monté Carlo simulations and Gross's framework, the authors find that the skewness strengthens the case for competition. Shifting a sizable percentage of a campaign budget away from media spending and into competitive generation of creative renderings apparently can be very profitable.