Examining the extent of and determinants for sustainability assurance quality: The role of audit committees

This study examines the extent of and determinants for sustainability assurance quality. Data comprise sustainability assurance statements published by the top 100 listed companies in Australia and New Zealand from 2017 to 2019. The findings indicate that Australian companies lead their New Zealand counterparts in sustainability assurance. Although sustainability reporting has risen, assurance rates remain significantly low. Accountants dominate the market, and companies prefer to use their own auditors for sustainability assurance work. Sustainability assurance quality is poor and does not vary significantly among Australian and New Zealand companies. Low-quality sustainability assurance plays a limited role in mitigating potential stakeholder–agency conflicts. The regression analysis indicates that audit committee characteristics such as members' independence, industry/market expertise, and attending meetings enhance sustainability assurance quality, whereas audit committee size has no affect. These findings suggest that audit committee characteristics such as independence, industry expertise, and regular meeting attendance have the potential to reduce stakeholder–agency conflicts by improving the quality of sustainability statement assurance. Our findings build on the sustainability assurance literature by exploring current trends in sustainability assurance practices in Australia and New Zealand where corporate governance codes have been recently revised. Further, these findings are timely given recent changes in standards (International Standard on Assurance Engagements [ISAE] 3000 and Global Reporting Initiative [GRI]). Our study contributes to the audit committee literature and sheds light on the role played by audit committee characteristics on sustainability assurance statement quality. The study findings potentially offer useful insights for practitioners, standard setters, and regulators.     

Paired comparison models with age effects modeled as piecewise quadratic splines

We propose new models for analyzing pairwise comparison data, such as that relating to sports. We focus on changes in players’ strengths and the prediction of future results. Our models are based on the Thurstone-Mosteller and Bradley–Terry models, and make use of the time variation in the parameters. Furthermore, we apply our models to data from the Japanese traditional sport sumo, and analyze this data. The proposed models perform better than the standard Thurstone-Mosteller and Bradley–Terry models according to both the Akaike information criterion and the Brier score. We compare the proposed models in detail by focusing on individual sumo wrestlers.     

The shared environmental responsibility principle: new developments applied to the case of marine ecosystems

Estuaries provide advantageous sites for both harbors and fish habitats. In many countries, harbor expansion in estuaries contributed to the decline of fish populations with impacts at the global scale. Restoring these habitats is important to prevent a global biodiversity crisis but is costly and potentially unaffordable for polluters under the Polluter Pays Principle. Such affordability issues prompt decision-makers to reduce environmental targets of restoration programs. Harbor infrastructures destroy fish habitats but generate benefits for society and contribute to the public interest, raising some questions on who is responsible for environmental degradations and who can afford environmental restoration costs? One way to allocate restoration costs is to analyze the amount of harbor services consumed by economic sectors. This paper addresses these questions by computing burden sharing scenarios with an input–output matrix. These scenarios are simulated under the shared responsibility principle to distribute restoration costs among stakeholders in the Seine estuary, France.     

Appropriate assumption on cross-hauling national input–output table regionalization

Input–output tables are useful for regional economic analyses. Although scholars often regionalize national input–output tables, cost-related issues make surveying regional trade flow difficult; hence, non-survey approaches are implemented instead. While location quotient (LQ) approaches have been used widely, they ignore cross-hauling in interregional trade. Therefore, alternative non-survey approaches with different assumptions on cross-hauling are used, such as cross-hauling depends on regional size and cross-hauling is proportional to its potential determined by output or demand. This study concludes that the most appropriate assumption, as per the relative performance of non-survey approaches, is that cross-hauling is in proportion to trade volume.     

Why,did I lose? Debriefing quality and its effects on justice,protests, and sales loss attributions

When suppliers lose in a competitive tender process, they need feedback to make accurate sales loss attributions and adjustments to their competitive strategy. Unfortunately, buyers seldomly provide sufficient feedback to enable diagnostics, learning, and adaptation. The purpose of this research is to explore a buyer's debriefing as an effective feedback mechanism. Based on data from a sample of 218 U.S. government source selections, a new construct, debriefing quality, is developed as a multi-dimensional construct comprised of: proposal efficacy information, procedural compliance and decision understanding information, and competitive intelligence information. Results show that debriefing quality enhances procedural justice and internal and external attributions and reduces supplier opportunism and perceptions of buyer opportunism. Further, the underlying procedural justice of the source selection deters bid protests, and debriefing quality can impact perceptions of procedural justice. Importantly, debriefing quality is essential in the assignment of loss attributions to strategy, thus affecting strategy change. These findings expand attribution theory by identifying new external attributions particular to a business-to-business context, namely suspicion of buyer opportunism and procedural justice. The study closes with specific information buyers can provide to suppliers to mitigate bid protests and help suppliers learn from the tender enabling future strategy improvements.     

The effect of controversial global sourcing practices on the ethical judgments and intentions of U.S. consumers

Global sourcing has led to lower cost and more effective supply chains for many companies. However, when the cost-driven practices of many suppliers in these chains come to light there is often considerable debate over the ethics of these practices. This research uses the well-known Hunt–Vitell framework as the theoretical foundation for a structural equation model of the deontological and teleological evaluations used by consumers when making ethical judgments of a firm's controversial cost-driven global sourcing practices. Data from a large-scale U.S. consumer survey show the importance of deontological and teleological evaluations in forming consumers’ ethical judgments of global sourcing practices, and establish a strong relationship between ethical judgment and the intention of consumers to alter consumption of a firm's products. Extensions to the framework and demographic analyses for age, gender, and income provide insights as to how perceptions of these practices affect consumer evaluations of a company involved in global sourcing and how consumers actualize their resultant intentions.     

Equilibrium theory under ambiguity

We extend the classical results on the Walras–core existence and equivalence to an ambiguous asymmetric information economy; that is, an economy where agents maximize Maximin Expected Utility (MEU). The interest of considering ambiguity arises from the fact that, in the presence of MEU decision making, there is no conflict between efficiency and incentive compatibility (contrary to the Bayesian decision making). Our new modeling of an ambiguous asymmetric information economy necessitates new equilibrium notions, which are always efficient and incentive compatible.     

Convergence,Divergence or Stability – How do Politicians' and Bureaucrats' Attitudes Change During an Election Period?

Abstract

The possibility that administrators mould politicians into bureaucratic thinking has been a recurring theme in politics since the writings of Weber and von Mises. However, empirical studies of attitude change in the interface between politics and officials are scarce. This study, using data from thirty Norwegian municipalities, investigates whether political attitudes towards diverse political issues change during an election period, and whether any such change aligns politicians' attitudes with those of the administrative leaders in the municipalities. Attitudes were measured among both politicians and administrators in 2000 (six months after the election) and 2003 (six months before the election). In general, there are few signs that politicians' attitudes converged with those of the administrators in the period studied. When attitudinal change does occur, it appears to be parallel in both groups. The findings do not support the notion that politicians' attitudes become aligned to the attitudes of leading administrators. Different explanations are discussed.     

The Intellectual Structure Of Research Into PPPs

Abstract

Public–private partnerships (or PPPs) encompass a broad spectrum of public sector infrastructure and service initiatives. Recently, some scholars have undertaken literature review studies of the various definitions of the concept of PPPs and its research traditions, identifying several distinct PPP research approaches. This article aims to: (1) enhance the findings of these literature reviews; (2) identify the cited works and authors (intellectual structure) in the published research on PPPs; (3) define the subfields that constitute the intellectual structure of PPP research fields. The methodology is based on the bibliometric techniques of citation and author co-citation analysis applied to published research on PPPs included in the Social Science Citation Index.     

Managing Competing Institutional Logics in Public–Private Joint Ventures

Abstract

Cross-sector inter-organizational partnerships, alliances and networks have become extremely popular. Yet, we may expect competing societal-level institutional logics to play an important role in cross-sector alliances, hence making their management central to alliance success. This article responds to the general research question: How do participants of public–private joint ventures manage competing institutional logics? Based on in-depth interviews we empirically characterize two competing logics in a cross-sector collaborative and identify two practices used to cope with them.