sustainable development and corporate performance a study based on the dow jones sustainability index the goal of this paper is to examine whether business performance is affected by the adoption of practices included under the term corporate social responsibility csr to achieve this goal we analyse the relation between csr and certain accounting indicators and examine whether there exist significant differences in performance indicators between european firms that have adopted csr and others that have not the effects of compliance with the requirements of csr were determined on the basis of firms included in the dow jones sustainability index djsi and specific accounting indicators were applied to measure performance for the purposes of this study we selected one group of firms belonging to the djsi and another comprised of firms quoted on the dow jones global index djgi but not on the djsi the sample was made up of two groups of 55 firms studied for the period 1998 2004 empirical analysis supports the conclusion that differences in performance exist between firms that belong to the djsi and to the djgi and that these differences are related to csr practices we find that a short term negative impact on performance is produced

the value relevance of reputation for sustainability leadership this study investigates whether the market valuation of the two summary accounting measures book value of equity and net income is higher for firms with reputation for sustainability leadership when compared to firms that do not enjoy such reputation the results are interpreted through the lens of a framework combining signalling theory and resource based theory according to which firms signal their commitment to sustainability to influence the external perception of reputation a firm s reputation for being committed to sustainability is an intangible resource that can increase the value of a firm s expected cash flows and or reduce the variability of its cash flows our findings are according to expectations and show that the net income of firms with good sustainability reputation has a higher valuation by the market when compared to their counterparts

a theory of voting equilibria a voting equilibrium arises when the voters in an electorate acting in accordance with both their preferences for the candidates and their perceptions of the relative chances of various pairs of candidates being in contention for victory generate an election result that justifies their perceptions voting equilibria always exist and the set of equilibria can vary substantially with the choice of voting system we compare equilibria under the plurality rule approval voting and the borda system we consider a candidate positioning game and find that the plurality rule imposes little restriction on the position of the winning candidate in three candidate races while approval voting leads to a winner positioned at the median of the voter distribution we contrast campaign activities intended to influence voter preferences with activities meant to influence only perceptions of candidate viability

unanimous rules in the laboratory we study the information aggregation properties of unanimous voting rules in the laboratory in line with theoretical predictions we find that majority rule with veto power dominates unanimity rule we also find that the strategic voting model is a fairly good predictor of subject behavior finally we exploit a framing effect to study how the presence of less sophisticated agents affects veto s welfare properties

do voters vote ideologically abstract in this paper we address the following question to what extent is the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically i e they always vote for the candidate who is ideologically closest to them testable or falsifiable we show that using data only on how individuals vote in a single election the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is irrefutable regardless of the number of candidates competing in the election on the other hand using data on how the same individuals vote in multiple elections the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is potentially falsifiable and we provide general conditions under which the hypothesis can be tested

the role of corporate sustainability performance for economic performance a firm level analysis of moderation effects abstract this paper analyses the link between sustainability management and economic performance its main research question concerns the association of social responsibility and environmental management with economic performance determinants of the latter and possible moderation effects based on data collected from financial databases and kinder lydenberg domini for the period 1992 to 2003 the paper analyses the link of corporate sustainability performance with economic performance using panel estimation techniques the analysis shows that advertising intensity moderates the association of corporate sustainability performance and economic performance as measured by tobin s q for research and development efforts relative to firm size no moderating role on the link between corporate sustainability and economic performance is identified a sensitivity analysis using separate measures for social and environmental performance reveals that the latter only has a direct effect and the former only a fully moderated effect on economic performance policy and management implications of these findings are discussed

do stock investors value corporate sustainability evidence from an event study this paper analyzes the impacts of index inclusions and exclusions on corporate sustainable firms by studying a sample of us stocks that are added to or deleted from the dow jones sustainability world index over the period 2002 2008 the impacts are measured in terms of stock return risk and liquidity we cannot find any strong evidence that announcement per se has any significant impact on stock return and risk however on the day of change index inclusion exclusion stocks experience a significant but temporary increase decrease in stock return liquidity deteriorates after the announcement day and bounces back significantly near the day of change systematic risk shows little change after announce ments but idiosyncratic risk is higher after announcements the overall results support harris and eitan s the journal of finance41 4 815 829 1986 price pressure hypothesis which posits that event announcement does not carry information and any shift in demand and hence the corresponding price change and liquidity change is temporary

a theory of strategic voting in runoff elections abstract this paper analyzes the properties of runoff electoral systems when voters are strategic a model of three candidate runoff elections is presented and two new features are included the risk of upset victory in the second round is endogenous and many types of runoff systems are considered three main results emerge first runoff elections produce equilibria in which only two candidates receive a positive fraction of the votes second a sincere voting equilibrium does not always exist finally runoff systems with a threshold below 50 percent produce an ortega effect that may lead to the systematic victory of the condorcet loser jel c72 d72

a theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

emissions trading and transaction costs analyzing the flaws in the discussion abstract although emissions trading lowers the costs of climate change mitigation transaction costs e g to find a trading partner may reduce its cost effectiveness some economists claim that transaction costs for joint implementation ji and clean development mechanism cdm projects will be higher than for international emissions trading iet transfers arguing that projects require advance approval whereas permit transfers can be automatically registered and checked annually however this article demonstrates the incompleteness of their views by both analyzing empirical data and discussing the theoretical conditions under which transaction costs decrease for ji and cdm and increase for iet

why vote for losers voting theory generally concludes that in first past the post elections all votes should go to effective candidates duverger s law and parties should adopt a similar platform median voter theorem however such predictions are not always met in practice we show why divergence and vote dispersion is a natural outcome when a parties are opportunistic b there is uncertainty on the position of the median voter and c elections are repeated voting for losers increases the informational content of elections and may induce mainstream parties to relocate towards extremists as a result to maximize their probability of being elected they do not adopt median

information aggregation rationality and the condorcet jury theorem the condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the better of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote sincerely in the collective decision making a seemingly innocuous assumption given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative however in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference in particular sincere voting does not constitute a nash equilibrium a satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably do better than individuals therefore has yet to be derived

an investigation of real versus perceived csp in s p 500 firms firms are spending billions annually in the name of corporate social responsibility csr whilst markets are increasingly willing to reward good and responsible firms they lack the instruments to measure corporate social performance csp to convince investors and other stakeholders firms invest heavily in building a reputation for good corporate behaviour this article argues that reputations for csp are often unrepresentative of true csp and investigates how differences in perceived and actual as measured by the fortune and kld databases respectively can partly be explained by firm characteristics amongst other things it finds that overrated firms are more likely to be relatively big profitable operating in non polluting but competitive industries and with no history of wrong doings to their primary stakeholders they will also typically spend a lot of effort satisfying the claims of their secondary stakeholders above all the results emphasise the need for researchers to recognise that the databases measure different phenomenon and are not interchangeable

on the determinants of corporate social responsibility international evidence on the financial industry this article sets out to undertake a thorough point by point examination of the theory postulated by campbell 2007 in which an attempt is made to specify the conditions under which corporations may or may not act in socially responsible ways in order to ensure the overall reliability of our study and to attempt to provide a new understanding of and greater insights into whether corporate social responsibility csr is affected by financial and institutional variables we empirically investigate a total of 520 financial firms in 34 countries between the years 2003 and 2005 our empirical findings are i firms with larger size are more csr minded and the financial performance and csr are not related ii firms would actually act in more socially responsible ways to enhance their competitive advantages when the market competitiveness is more intense iii financial firms in countries with stronger levels of legal enforcement tend to engage in more csr activities however interestingly and rather strikingly those firms in countries with stronger shareholder rights tend to engage in less csr activities and iv self regulation within the financial industry has a significantly positive effect on csr with firms being found to act in more socially responsible ways in those countries which have more cooperative employer employee relations higher quality management schools and a better macroeconomic environment

multicandidate elections aggregate uncertainty in the laboratory the rational voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions the paradox of voting and duverger s law are at odds with reality recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an arguably unrealistic assumption the absence of aggregate uncertainty about the distribution of preferences in the electorate in this paper we propose direct empirical evidence of the effects of aggregate uncertainty in multicandidate elections adopting a theory based experimental approach we explore whether aggregate uncertainty indeed favors the emergence of non duverger s law equilibria in plurality elections our experimental results support the main theoretical predictions

information aggregation and strategic abstention in large laboratory elections this paper compares strategic abstention in ad hoc committees versus standing committees ad hoc committees meet only once and then dissolve while standing committees the central finding from this study is that most of the predictions of swing voter curse theory hold up in large elections conducted under controlled laboratory conditions there is significant abstention and significant balancing of partisans by uniformed voters and vote balancing increases with the partisan imbalance elections with no partisan imbalance successfully aggregate information and lead to efficient outcomes consistent with swing voter curse theory this efficiency falls off as partisan imbalance increases but to a significantly greater extent than is predicted in equilibrium it is instructive to compare these findings in large elections with results from the elections reported in battaglini et al 2007 all of the qualitative results are the same concerning the comparative statics balancing and abstention one slight difference is that there was less irrational voting for in the small elections than in the large elections except for the 5 9 m 0 treatment where we observed 20 voting for in the small elections compared with 10 voting for in the large elections these differences were reflected in slightly different efficiency results between small and large elections with the comparisons mirroring the differences in voting for more irrational voting results in lower e ciency we conclude that this scaled up study successfully replicates the initial swing voter s curse experiment reported in battaglini et al 2007 obtaining very similar findings in laboratory committees that are three times the size of those in the original study the one caveat is that we found evidence of a slight increase in irrational nonequilibrium behavior voting for in the larger elections whether this trend would continue as election size is further scaled up is an open question a swing voter s curse environment

signaling sustainability leadership empirical evidence of the value of djsi membership we explore the relationship between corporate sustainability reputation and firm value by asking whether signaling sustainability leadership through membership on a recognized sustainability index is value generating increasingly stakeholders are demanding that firms demonstrate their commitment to sustainability one signal that companies can send to stakeholders to indicate that they are sustainability leaders is membership on a recognized best in class sustainability index this article explores both the short term and the intermediary impact on north american firms of being included or removed from the dow jones sustainability world index djsi our results provide evidence that being added to the djsi results in a sustained increase in a firm s share price suggesting that the benefits of being included on the djsi outweigh the costs associated with applying this article also notes a temporary decrease in the value of firms for the first 10 days after their removal from the djsi however this effect is eliminated within the next ten trading days

the manufacturing sector s environmental motives a game theoretic analysis what motivates manufacturing companies to make costly investments in producing in an environmentally clean manner the traditional argument is that such behaviour is value reducing and that therefore firms must be forced by regulation to invest in green production processes a counter argument is that firms have an incentive to make environmental investments in an attempt to attract green consumers and investors hence gaining competitive advantage over their rivals in this paper we employ a game theoretic approach that demonstrates that competing firms incentives to make voluntary investments in environmental clean up are affected by the size of the investment costs and the extent of consumer and investor green awareness we argue that an increase in green behaviour can be induced by a combination of governmental subsidies for firms that invest in environmentally clean production processes together with an education program that promotes green awareness amongst consumers investors and the managers themselves

the market for sulfur dioxide emissions the 1990 clean air act amendments initiated the first large scale use of the tradable permit approach to pollution control the theoretical case for this approach rests on the assumption of an efficient market for emission rights the authors empirical analysis shows that the emission rights market created by the 1990 amendments had become reasonably efficient by mid 1994 they also show that the auctions specified in the amendments to jump start trading had become a small part of the overall market finally the authors demonstrate that the strategic bidding behavior discussed in the literature has had no effect on market prices copyright 1998 by american economic association

learning about voter rationality we model the accountability relationship between voters and politicians to clarify what can and can t be learned about voter rationality from existing evidence from the behavior literature we make two key points first we show that evidence on the electoral consequences of natural disasters and economic shocks typically interpreted as evidence for voter irrationality is consistent with a canonical model with rational voters second we show that the evidence on the electoral consequences of disaster response typically interpreted as evidence for voter rationality is consistent with the same model with irrational voters hence neither body of evidence can adjudicate between rational and irrational voting behavior we also derive new hypotheses that can better guide future empirical work attempting to assess voter rationality

global standards and ethical stock indexes the case of the dow jones sustainability stoxx index the increased scrutiny of investors regarding the non financial aspects of corporate performance has placed portfolio managers in the position of having to weigh the benefits of holding the market against the cost of having positions in companies that are subsequently found to have questionable business practices the availability of stock indexes based on sustainability screening makes increasingly viable for institutional investors the transition to a portfolio based on a socially responsible investment sri benchmark at relatively low cost the increasing share of socially responsible investments may play a role in providing incentives towards a continuous upgrading of sustainability standards to the extent that their performance is not systematically inferior to that of the other funds this article examines whether these incentives have been so far detectable with particular reference to the dow jones sustainability stoxx index djssi that focuses on the european corporations with the highest csr scores among those included in the dow jones stoxx 600 index the aim of the article is twofold first we analyse the performance of the djssi over the period 2001 2006 compared to that of the surrogate complementary index sci a new benchmark that includes only the components of the dj stoxx 600 that do not belong to the ethical index to evaluate more correctly the size of possible divergent performances second we perform an event study on the same data set to analyse whether the stock market evaluation reacts to the inclusion deletion in the djssi in both cases the results suggest that the evaluation of the csr performance of a firm is a significant criterion for asset allocation activities

what determines the inclusion in a sustainability stock index a panel data analysis for european companies this paper examines the determinants of the inclusion of european companies in the dow jones sustainability world index and the dow jones stoxx sustainability index in doing so the paper contributes to the micro econometric literature analyzing the determinants and economic effects of sustainability performance in three respects first it examines a broad measure of corporate sustainability behavior and thus does not only apply narrow measures of environmental performance such as toxic releases which is common in other studies second the paper examines the effect of internal assessment processes regarding corporate sustainability performance by an independent financial service institution finally it analyzes the influence of unobserved heterogeneity in the framework of panel data models the analysis shows that the probability for an inclusion in the sustainability indexes strongly decreases if a company does not respond to the written survey of the assessing institution furthermore time invariant random effects and an autoregressive structure in the stochastic components are important factors in contrast a significant influence of past economic performance cannot be confirmed robustly

the swing voter s curse in the laboratory this paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter s curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on pivotal voter models our experiment controls for different information levels of voters as well as the size of the electorate the distribution of preferences and other theoretically relevant parameters the design varies the share of partisan voters and the prior belief about a payoff relevant state of the world our results support the equilibrium predictions of the feddersen pesendorfer model and clearly reject the notion that voters in the laboratory use naive decision theoretic strategies the voters act as if they are aware of the swing voter s curse and adjust their behavior to compensate while the compensation is not complete and there is some heterogeneity in individual behavior we find that aggregate outcomes such as efficiency turnout and margin of victory closely track the theoretical predictions

a critical review of sustainable business indices and their impact most studies into the performance of socially responsible investment vehicles have focused on the performance of sustainable or socially responsible mutual funds this research has been complemented recently by a number of studies that have examined the performance of sustainable investment indices in both cases the majority of studies have concluded that the returns of socially responsible investment vehicles have either underperformed or failed to outperform comparable market indices although the impact of sustainable indices to date has been limited the recent launch of sustainable indices by dow jones and ftse suggests that more attention is being paid to the subject by financial markets investors and companies this development raises a number of important issues which are reviewed in this article a the performance of indices compared with their benchmark indices b the methodologies employed in compiling the indices and c the impact of the indices on companies and the investment community the article concludes with a number of suggestions for areas that merit future research

voting as communicating this paper develops a model where voters trade off two different motives when deciding how to vote they care about current decision making they are strategic but they also care about communicating their views about their most preferred candidate so as to influence future elections by influencing other voters opinion and or party positioning in effect voters in this model are intermediate between strategic and sincere voters of conventional models in elections with more than 2 candidates this allows us to better investigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems our main conclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoral systems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication e g by opting for 2 round systems rather than 1 round systems

an experimental study of jury decision rules we present experimental results on groups facing a decision problem analogous to that faced by a jury we consider three treatment variables group size three or six number of votes needed for conviction majority or unanimity and pre vote deliberation we find evidence of strategic voting under the unanimity rule a large fraction of our subjects vote for a decision analogous to conviction even when their private information indicates a state analogous to innocence this is roughly consistent with the game theoretic predictions of feddersen and pesendorfer although individual behavior is explained well by the game theoretic model there are discrepancies at the level of the group decision contrary to feddersen and pesendorfer in our experiments there are fewer outcomes analogous to incorrect convictions under unanimity rule than under majority rule in the case of no deliberation we simultaneously account for the individual and group data using quantal response equilibrium

expert information and majority decisions this paper shows theoretically and experimentally that hearing expert opinions can be a double edged sword for collective decision making we present a majoritarian voting game of common interest where committee members receive not only private information but also expert information that is more accurate than private information and observed by all members in theory there are bayesian nash equilibria where the committee members voting strategy incorporates both types of information and access to expert information enhances the efficiency of the majority decision however there is also a class of potentially inefficient equilibria where a supermajority always follow expert information and the majority decision does not aggregate private information in the laboratory the majority decisions and the subjects voting behaviour were largely consistent with those in the class of inefficient equilibria we found a large efficiency loss due to t he presence of expert information especially when the committee size was large we suggest that it may be desirable for expert information to be revealed only to a subset of committee members

on the theory of strategic voting many analyses of plurality rule elections predict the complete coor dination of strategic voting and hence support for only two candidates here i suggest that stable multi candidate support will arise in equilibrium a group of voters must partially coordinate behind one of two challenging candidates in order to dislodge a disliked incumbent in a departure from existing models the popular support for each challenger is uncertain this support must be inferred from the private observation of informative signals such as the social communication of pref erences throughout the electorate or the imperfect observation of opinion polls the uniquely stable voting equilibrium entails only limited strategic voting and hence incomplete coordination this is due to the surprising presence of negative feed back an increase in the degree of strategic voting by others reduces the incentives for an individual to vote strategically the incentive to vote strategically is lower in relatively marginal elections after controlling for the distance from contention of a trailing preferred challenger a calibration of the model applied to the uk general election of 1997 is consistent with the impact of strategic voting and the reported accuracy of voters understanding of the electoral situation it suggests that nearly 50 seats may have been lost by the conservative party due to strategic voting 1 plurality rule elections and strategic voting 1 1 strategic voting and duverger s law plurality rule elections where the winner is the candidate who receives the largest number of votes are vulnerable to strategic voting a voter might well switch away from her preferred candidate and toward a perceived leader in the hope of exerting a greater influence over the outcome of the election this phenomenon has long been the focus of both economic and political scientific study in an influential essay riker 1982b cited droop s 1871 eloquent exposition of the strategic voting problem 1 i oer my grateful thanks to the many friends colleagues seminar participants referees and editors who have oered insightful comments during the long gestation of this paper its antecedents and companion work special thanks go to steve fisher whose empirical analysis of strategic voting raised many of the questions that i seek to answer in this paper and to chris wallace this particular paper brings together much of the analysis previously circulated in the papers a new theory of strategic voting strategic voting under the qualified majority rule and idiosyncrasy information and the impact of strategic voting

stability and coordination in duverger s law a formal model of preelection polls and strategic voting this paper investigates the dynamics of the wasted vote phenomenon and duverger s law i construct a theoretical model in order to consider how preelection polls serve to inform the electorate about the relative chances of the candidates and how that information acts over time to decrease the support of the trailing candidate the results shed light on how public opinion polls can aggregate information in the electorate and coordinate voters on the viable candidates in the election specifically i show that in a bayesian game model of strategic voting there exist non duvergerian equilibria in which all three candidates receive votes in the limit these equilibria require extreme coordination however and any variation in beliefs leads voters away from them to one of the duvergerian equilibria thus non duvergerian equilibria are unstable while two party equilibria are not in addition i describe how preelection polls provide information to voters about the viability of candidates and can thus be used by voters to coordinate on a duvergerian outcome

economic theories of voter turnout i the voting paradox why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue why would a rational voter vote downs 1957 ii the paradox of indeterminacy if they vote why do they care who they vote for kirchgassner 1992 kirchgassner and pommerehne 1993 iii the paradox of ignorance to the extent that information is costly the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making downs 1957

rational choice theory and the paradox of not voting at least since downs s 1957 seminal work an economic theory of democracy rational choice theorists have appreciated the paradox of not voting in a large election the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small if each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome then even a small cost to vote like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather should dissuade anyone from voting yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote given the central place of voting within political economy the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem for the most part theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices the problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior in primary elections there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates abramson aldrich paolino and rohde 1992 in a seminal and comprehensive study cox 1997 shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models for example under plurality rule in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election

the impact of corporate pollution on market valuation some empirical evidence abstract this paper investigates the relation between the market valuation of publicly listed corporations and their social performance as measured by their pollution record relative to environmental regulations expectations are that corporations with a good bad environmental record should be valued at a premium discount by the stock market such a relation results from the emergence of ethical or green investing and from an increased awareness by investors of the potential negative consequences from corporate environmental damages two significant innovations are introduced in this study first using governmental data a pollution index is computed for each sample firm second the relevance of social information for investors purposes is directly assessed by looking at the relation between the pollution index and a firm s market valuation within the accounting identity framework modigliani and miller 1958 results suggest that a firm s pollution performance is interpreted by market participants as providing information about its environmental liabilities furthermore results weakly support the existence of a premium discount in the stock market valuation of firms that meet do not meet environmental regulations thus lending some credence to the existence of a demand by some stock market participants for ethical or green investments this suggests that the disclosure of audited social information of a non financial nature in a firm s annual report could be beneficial to market participants

how does the market value corporate sustainability performance this study provides empirical evidence on how corporate sustainability performance csp as proxied by membership of the dow jones sustainability index is reflected in the market value of equity using a theoretical framework combining institutional perspectives stakeholder theory and resource based perspectives we develop a set of hypotheses that relate the market value of equity to csp for a sample of north american firms our preliminary results show that csp has significant explanatory power for stock prices over the traditional summary accounting measures such as earnings and book value of equity however further analyses suggest that we should not focus on corporate sustainability itself our findings suggest that what investors really do is to penalize large profitable firms with low level of csp firms with incentives to develop a high level of csp not engaging on such strategy are thus penalized by the market

inferring strategic voting we estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes we adopt a set estimator using japanese general election data we nd a large fraction 75 3 80 3 of strategic voters only a small fraction 2 4 5 5 of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred misaligned voting existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting accordingly while our estimate of strategic voting is high our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies

corporate sustainability ratings an investigation into how corporations use the dow jones sustainability index abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore the use of the dow jones sustainability index djsi with an emphasis on canadian corporations the paper provides insight into the use of the djsi in several areas including the use of its logo the steps taken by corporations to achieve initial acceptance to the index and the steps corporations take to maintain their inclusion in the djsi a content analysis of publicly available information from 24 canadian corporations listed in the djsi north america djsina showed that less than half of those sampled used the djsi logo in their sustainability reports or on their websites the majority of the published references to the djsi were in highlighting corporate achievements or in providing background information on the index a survey of 10 experts from the canadian corporations listed in the djsina revealed a wide range of strategies for gaining and maintaining inclusion in the index particularly involving a large number of internal stakeholders in responding to data requests and working with third parties several suggestions for improving the djsi were also provided including streamlining the questionnaire improving coordination among sustainability ratings agencies and enhancing transparency