Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy in the Hotel Industry: Evidence from the Balearic Islands

This paper attempts to identify some of the main factors affecting a hotel establishment's decision to adopt (or not), and to what extent, socially and environmentally responsible business practices. Salient among the results obtained is the fact that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is likely to be part of a hotel's product differentiation strategy; additionally, it is shown that productivity aspects such as scale economies, as well as the hotel's internal organization, also impact a hotel's CSR strategy. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ANALYSING THE STRUCTURE OF THE ECONOMY USING PHYSICAL INPUT–OUTPUT TABLES

Analyses using physical input–output tables (PIOTs) are key to understanding the physical metabolism of economies, since they relate production to the generation of emissions and use of resources. Two methods have been developed to calculate the primary resources and emissions associated with a given final demand. However, one of these alters the PIOT, revealing different technical coefficients and Leontief inverse matrices. Which method should be used for structural analysis? In this paper, I compare both methods, explain the structural differences between them and illustrate the latter through a backward linkage analysis. I find that only one method is suited to the analysis of the physical structure of the economy, since it comprehends both the production of goods and associated emissions. The method is identified as a new model capable of tracing by-products as final outputs. Finally, I generalise both methods to analyse PIOTs including several emission types.     

Wild Bids. Gambling for Resurrection in Procurement Contracts

This paper analyses the problem of abnormally low tenders in the procurement process. Limited liability causes firms in a bad financial situation to bid more aggressively than financially healthy firms in the procurement auction. Therefore, it is likely that the winning firm is a firm in financial difficulties with a high risk of bankruptcy. The paper focuses on the regulatory practice of surety bonds to face this problem. We show that the use of surety bonds reduces and sometimes eliminates the problem of abnormally low tenders. We provide a characterization of the optimal surety bond and show that the U.S. practice of requiring that surety bonds cover over 100% of the contract price can be excessive, implying overinsurance to the problem of abnormally low tenders.     

Regulation, Corporate Social Responsibility and Activism

This paper analyzes the interplay between firms' self-regulation (often denoted as corporate social responsibility) as opposed to the formal regulation of a negative externality. Firms respond to increasing activism in the market (conscious consumers that take into account the external effects of their purchase) by providing more socially responsible goods. However, because regulation is the outcome of a political process, an increase in activism might imply an inefficiently high externality level. This may happen when a majority of non-activist consumers collectively free-ride on conscious consumers. By determining a softer than optimal regulation, they benefit from the behavior of firms, yet they have access to cheaper (although less efficient) goods .     

The Role of Public Information in Corporate Social Responsibility

Many of the attributes that make a good “socially responsible” (SR) are credence attributes that cannot be learned by consumers either through search or experience. Consumers, then, use for their purchasing decisions “noisy” information about these attributes obtained from potentially contradictory channels (media, advertisement, NGOs). In this paper we model such informational framework and show the positive relationship between the accuracy of the information transmitted to consumers and corporate social responsibility. We also show that a firm may be tempted to add noise to the information channel (through lobbying of the media), which might reduce the supply of the SR attributes and even harm the firm itself (with lower profits). It might then be profitable to the firm to commit ex ante to not manipulate the information regarding the firm's business practices (e.g., with a partnership with an NGO). Finally, we extend our model to a competition framework endogenizing the number of firms active in the SR segment. We show both that in more transparent markets a larger number of firms will be SR, and that in a market with more intense competition, a higher degree of transparency is required in order to sustain a given number of SR firms.