The Ethics of International Transfer Pricing

This paper addresses the conflicting environmental interests of a firm and the community, an important stakeholder. The short-term profit maximization objective of a firm may stand in contrast with what the community wants – a "safe and clean environment". This paper argues that the information regarding the environmental impact of a firm's products, processes, and waste may be asymmetrically distributed between the firm and the community. The resultant information asymmetry may influence the probability of a firm acting opportunistically, and ultimately, a firm's ethical behavior. The paper identifies information asymmetry between a firm and community, as well as that within the community. The perceived information asymmetry across various community segments may perhaps be a determinant of environmental discrimination. The paper further contends that information asymmetry may diminish in the long run. Finally it examines the implications of information asymmetry for firms and government policy.     

Existence of equilibria in the overlapping generations model: the nontransitive case

Summary This paper investigates the existence of competitive equilibria in dynamic exchange models with countably many periods and countably many agents. At each period the commodity space can be finite or infinite dimensional. The preferences of agents are not assumed to be transitive or complete. A first equilibrium existence theorem is established under the classical assumption that there exists a finite set of non-negligible agents. In the particular case of an overlapping generations model, a second existence theorem allows simultaneously for finite-lived assets and infinite-lived assets and limits the previous assumption to infinite-lived assets. This theorem covers obviously the standard case of an overlapping generations model where the agents have no endowment outside their lifetime.     

Decentralizing Edgeworth equilibria in economies with many commodities

Summary. This paper proves core-equivalence theorems for exchange economies without ordered preferences, defined on locally convex Riesz commodity spaces such that the price space is a lattice. Properness assumptions are borrowed from some recent equilibrium existence results. Received: January 15, 1998; revised version: August 19, 1998