The Cognitive Side of Social Responsibility

Individuals sit on the board of directors and set organizational goals, individuals make the product, push new marketing campaigns, make tough decisions, create new products, and so on. What is the role of social responsibility (SR) in their thinking? Do individuals need to behave responsibly to live in a social environment? Could this be grounded in their cognition? Furthermore, is there room for SR in our cognitive processes? And then, how can this analysis help studies on socially responsible business? The article presents how the distributed cognition approach provides a viable explanation for SR in human thinking. The exploitation of external – both social and nonsocial – resources shapes cognitive processes such that the idea of the “isolated brain” is definitely abandoned. Our social cognition uses responsibility as a support mechanism that sustains or discharges distributive processes. The article uses the notion of docility to keep cognition and social behavior together. The conclusion is that SR is (1) a mechanism that allows individuals to maintain cognitive advantages and (2) it emerges when the same social channel is exploited for extended periods of time.     

Asymptotically Optimal Response‐Adaptive Designs for Allocating the Best Treatment: An Overview

Response‐adaptive designs are being used increasingly in applications, and this is especially so in early phase clinical trials. This paper reviews a particular class of response‐adaptive designs that have the property of picking the superior treatment with probability tending to one. This is a desirable property from an ethical point of view in clinical trials. The model underlying such designs is a randomly reinforced urn. This paper provides an overview of results for these designs, starting from the early paper of Durham and Yu (1990) until the recent work by Flournoy, May, Moler and Plo (2010).     

Financial constraints and firm dynamics

This study analyzes the effect of financial constraints (FCs) on firm dynamics. We measure FCs with an official credit rating, which captures availability and cost of external resources. We find that FCs undermine average firm growth, induce anti-correlation in growth patterns and reduce the dependence of growth volatility on size. FCs are also associated with higher volatility and asymmetries in growth shock distributions, preventing young fast-growing firms especially from seizing attractive growth opportunities and further deteriorating the growth prospects of already slow-growing firms, particularly if old. The sub-diffusive nature of the growth process of constrained firms is compatible with the distinctive properties of their size distribution.     

Common Properties and Sectoral Specificities in the Dynamics of U.S. Manufacturing Companies

The size distribution and growth rate dynamics of U.S. companieshave been extensively studied by many authors. In this paper,using the COMPUSTAT database, we extend the analysis todisaggregated data, studying 15 sectors of the U.S.manufacturing industry. The sectoral investigation reveals thepresence of general statistical properties that can be consideredvalid across all the studied sectors. In particular, theprobability density of firms growth rates invariably displays acharacteristic tent shape and the relation between the size of afirm and the variance of its rates of growth is characterized, indifferent sectors, by very similar scaling relations. Thepresence of characteristics that are robust and sectoral invarianthints at the existence of generic statistical properties shapingthe dynamic of firms across the whole industry.     

Explaining the distribution of firm growth rates

Empirical analyses on aggregated datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of corporate growth rates. We present clear‐cut evidence on this topic using disaggregated data. We explain the observed regularities proposing a model in which firms' ability to take up new business opportunities increases with the number of opportunities already exploited. A theoretical result is presented for the limiting case in which the number of firms and opportunities go to infinity. Moreover, using simulations, we show that even in a small industry the agreement with asymptotic results is almost complete.     

Financial and economic determinants of firm default

This paper investigates the relevance of financial and economic variables as determinants of firm default. Our analysis covers a large sample of medium-sized limited liability firms. Since default might lead, through bankruptcy or radical restructuring, to firm’s exit, our work also relates to previous contributions on industrial demography. Using non parametric tests we assess to what extent defaulting firms differ from the non-defaulting group. Bootstrap probit regressions confirm that economic variables, in addition to standard financial indicators, play both a long and short term effect. Our findings are robust with respect to the inclusion of Distance to Default and risk ratings among the regressors.