Voluntary environmental codes of conduct in the tourism sector

Over recent years, voluntary environmental codes of conduct have come to the fore as a new and promising tool to raise awareness of environmental issues and improve behaviour and practices. They provide an interesting complement to other tools such as regulations and economic instruments. Within the tourism sector, codes of conduct are now sufficiently numerous and widespread to warrant an interim review of their content, implementation and effectiveness. This paper is based on a survey and analysis of existing codes developed by countries, industry associations and NGOs. It outlines the essential elements common to successful codes, and identifies some of the most common pitfalls. If such voluntary codes are to become a useful tool, they must be specific and action‐oriented and, above all, must be supported by programmes to facilitate implementation, monitoring and reporting of results.     

On the Probability of (Non-) Ruin in Infinite Time

In the context of the classical Poisson ruin model Gerber (1988a,b) and Shiu (1987, 1989) have obtained two formulae for the ruin and non ruin probabilities in infinite time. Here these two formulae are generalized to the case of an arbitrary premium process when all claims are integer-valued, as in Picard & Lefèvre (1997). Moreover, this generalization throws a new light on the two known formulae and it then leads very simply to a third new formula.     

International entrepreneurship: A critical analysis of studies in the past two decades and future directions for research

International entrepreneurship (IE) is an emerging field with a rapidly growing body of knowledge. This paper examines gaps, issues and trends of the IE in the last two decades. First, it suggests an integrative framework based on international business, entrepreneurship, strategic management, social network and marketing theories. The suggested model highlights the significant role played by the entrepreneur/team, firm and network resources that act as antecedents to international opportunity development and value innovation. Second, it suggests four typologies of firms (born global, enduring global, early exporter and mature exporter) that can be studied under the IE theme. Finally, we discuss future research directions.     

The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos

The article starts by arguing that seeing the firm as a mere nexus of contracts or as an abstract entity where different stakeholder interests concur is insufficient for a “humanistic business ethos”, which entails a complete view of the human being. It seems more appropriate to understand the firm as a human community, a concept which can be found in several sources, including managerial literature, business ethics scholars, and Catholic Social Teaching. In addition, there are also philosophical grounds that support the idea of business as a human community. Extending this concept, and drawing from some Phenomenological-Personalist philosophers, we propose that the firm should be seen as a particular “community of persons” oriented to providing goods and services efficiently and profitably. Being a “community of persons” emphasizes both individuals and the whole, and makes explicit the uniqueness, conscience, free will, dignity, and openness to human flourishing. This requires appropriate communication about and participation in matters which affect people’s life, and makes it essential to cooperate for the common good of the business firm and the society.     

How private is private information? The ability to spot deception in an economic game

We provide experimental evidence on the ability to detect deceit in a buyer–seller game with asymmetric information. Sellers have private information about the value of a good and sometimes have incentives to mislead buyers. We examine if buyers can spot deception in face-to-face encounters. We vary whether buyers can interrogate the seller and the contextual richness. The buyers’ prediction accuracy is above chance, and is substantial for confident buyers. There is no evidence that the option to interrogate is important and only weak support that contextual richness matters. These results show that the information asymmetry is partly eliminated by people’s ability to spot deception.     

The role of frames,numbers and risk in the frequency of cooperation

We report on a simple experiment that addresses three factors in the frequency of cooperation: (1) framing, (2) the number of players and (3) the perceived risk of cooperating. We work with a (two-player) Prisoner’s Dilemma and with a three-player, two-strategy Public Good Game. We also consider a payoff schedule isomorphic with the latter but in a nonsocial setup. These themes have been separately studied by a large number of experimental papers, using diverse methodologies. Our experiment targets them in a common, clear-cut framework that minimizes confusion. We find three strong effects (a) framing; (b) the number of players (there is less cooperation in the three-person games than in the two-person ones); (c) the neutralization of risk (about 50% of participants cooperate when risk is neutralized). Both (a) and (c) go in the expected direction, but, in all three cases, the strength of the effect is surprising. Cooperators appear to be more motivated by efficiency or by Kantian reasoning than by altruism.     

Risk-sharing Contracts with Asymmetric Information

We examine how risk-sharing is impacted by asymmetric information on the probability distribution of wealth. We define the optimal incentive compatible agreements in a two-agent model with two levels of wealth. When there is complete information on the probability of the different outcomes, the resulting allocation satisfies the mutuality principle (which states that everyone's final wealth depends only upon the aggregate wealth of the economy). This is no longer true when agents have private information regarding their probability distribution of wealth. Asymmetry of information (i) makes ex-post equal sharing unsustainable between two low-risk agents, and (ii) induces exchanges when agents have the same realization of wealth.     

Sustainable exploitation of a natural resource: a satisfying use of Chichilnisky’s criterion

Chichilnisky’s criterion for sustainability has the merit to be, so far, the unique explicit, complete and continuous social welfare criterion that combines successfully the requirement of efficiency with an instrumental notion of intergenerational equity (no dictatorship of the present and no dictatorship of the future). But it has one drawback: when applied in the context of renewable resources, and with a constant discount factor, there exists no exploitation path that maximizes this criterion. The present article suggests a way to cope with this problem. The idea is to restrict attention to the set of convex combinations between the optimal discounted utilitarian program and the stationary program leading to the green golden rule. It is shown that an optimal path in this set exists under rather weak sufficient conditions on the fundamentals of the problem. Some ethical properties of this approach are also discussed. In some cases, it turns out that the restricted solution implies no loss of efficiency and benefits intermediate and infinitely distant generations.     

What if women earned more than their spouses? An experimental investigation of work-division in couples

Female specialization on household work and male specialization on labor-market work is a widely observed phenomenon across time and countries. This absence of gender neutrality with respect to work-division is known as the “work-division puzzle”. Gender differences regarding characteristics (preferences, productivity) and context (wage rates, social norms) are generally recognized as competing explanations for this fact. We experimentally control for context and productivity to investigate preferences for work-division by true co-habiting couples, in a newly developed specialization task. Efficiency in this task comes at the cost of inequality, giving higher earnings to the “advantaged” player. We compare behavior when men (or women) are in the advantaged position, which corresponds to the traditional (or power) couple case where he (or she) earns more. Women and men contribute equally to the household public good in all conditions. This result allows us to rule out some of the standard explanations of the work-division puzzle.