guarding the guardians good government requires some restraints on the powerful but how can those be impose if there is no one above them this paper studies the equilibrium allocation of power and resources established by self interested incumbents under the threat of rebellions from inside and outside the group in power commitment to uphold individuals rights can only be achieved if power is not as concentrated as incumbents would like it to be ex post power sharing endogenously enables incumbents to commit to otherwise time inconsistent laws by ensuring more people receive rents under the status quo and thus want to defend it

pillage and property this paper introduces a class of coalitional games called pillage games as a model of hobbesian anarchy any coalition can pillage costlessly and with certainty any less powerful coalition power is endogenous so a pillage game does not have a characteristic function but pillage provides a domination concept that defines a stable set which represents an endogenous balance of power every stable set contains only finitely many allocations and can be represented as a farsighted core additional results are obtained for particular games including the game in which the power of each coalition is determined by its total wealth

effect sizes and the interpretation of research results in international business journal editors and academy presidents are increasingly calling on researchers to evaluate the substantive as opposed to the statistical significance of their results to measure the extent to which these calls have been heeded i aggregated the meta analytically derived effect size estimates obtained from 965 individual samples i then surveyed 204 studies published in the journal of international business studies i found that the average effect size in international business research is small and that most published studies lack the statistical power to detect such effects reliably i also found that many authors confuse statistical with substantive significance when interpreting their research results these practices have likely led to unacceptably high type ii error rates and invalid inferences regarding real world effects by emphasizing p values over their effect size estimates researchers are under selling their results and settling for contributions that are less than what they really have to offer in view of this i offer four recommendations for improving research and reporting practices

the formation of networks with transfers among players we examine the formation of networks among a set of players whose payoffs depend on the structure of the network when players may bargain by promising or demanding transfer payments when forming links we vary three aspects of the game i whether players can only make transfers to and receive transfers from players to whom they are directly linked or whether they can also subsidize links that they are not directly involved in ii whether or not transfers relating to a given link can be made contingent on the full resulting network or only on the link itself and iii whether or not players can pay other players to refrain from forming links we characterize the networks that are supported under these variations and show how each of the above aspects either accounts for a specific type of externality or deals with the combinatorial nature of network payoffs

are women really more risk averse than men a re analysis of the literature using expanded methods while a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that women are more risk averse than men this conclusion merits investigation after briefly clarifying the difference between making generalizations about groups on the one hand and making valid inferences from samples on the other this essay suggests improvements to how economists communicate our research results supplementing findings of statistical significance with quantitative measures of both substantive difference cohen s d a measure in common use in non economics literatures and of substantive overlap the index of similarity newly proposed here adds important nuance to the discussion of sex differences these measures are computed from the data on men women and risk used in 35 scholarly works from economics finance and decision science the results are considerably more mixed and overlapping than would commonly be inferred from the broad claims made in the literature with standardized differences in means mostly amounting to considerably less than one standard deviation and the degree of overlap between male and female distributions generally exceeding 80 in addition studies that look at contextual influences suggest that these contribute importantly to observations of differences both between and within the sexes

a model of endogenous government formation political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the formateur enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions however empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of gamson s law of portfolio allocation this article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously in equilibrium if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties sizes

farsighted coalitional stability abstract i define the largest consistent set a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts act publicly and are fully farsighted in that a coalition considers the possibility that once it acts another coalition might react a third coalition might in turn react and so on without limit i establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting i argue that it improves on the von neumann morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

the strategy structure of some coalition formation games in coalitional games with side payments the core predicts which coalitions form and how benefits are shared the predictions however run into difficulties if the core is empty or if some coalitions benefit from not blocking truthfully these difficulties are analyzed in games in which an a priori given collection of coalitions can form as the collection of pairs of buyer seller in an assignment game the incentive properties of the core and of its selections are investigated in function of the collection furthermore the relationships with vickrey clarke groves mechanisms are drawn

allocating value among farsighted players in network formation we study the stability of networks when players are farsighted and allocations are determined endogenously the set of strongly efficient networks is the unique von neumann morgenstern farsightedly stable set with bargaining if the value function is anonymous component additive and top convex and the allocation rule is anonymous and component efficient moreover the componentwise egalitarian allocation rule emerges endogenously

voting for voters a model of electoral evolution we model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote we adopt a number of simplifying assumptions the founders and the candidates are fixed the society operates for k periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period one vote is sufficient for admission and voters can support as many candidates as they wish voters assess the value of the streams of agents with whom they share the society while they belong to it in spite of these simplifications we show that interesting strategic behavior is implied by the dynamic structure of the problem the vote for friends may be postponed and it may be advantageous to vote for enemies we discuss the existence of different types of equilibria in pure strategies and point out interesting equilibria in mixed strategies

equilibrium binding agreements abstract we study equilibrium binding agreements the coalition structures that form under such agreements and the efficiency of the outcomes that result we analyze such agreements in a context where the payoff to each player depends on the actions of all other players thus a game in strategic form is a natural starting point unlike the device of a characteristic function explicit attention is paid to the behavior of the complementary set of players when a coalition blocks a proposed agreement a solution concept and its applications are discussed journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

the importance of international business to the strategic agenda of u s ceos the growth of international business ib and concerns about the relevance of ib research indicate the need for managerial input on the topic a survey of 108 u s ceos reveals that ib issues are an important part of their strategic agenda four types of ib issues are identified which reveal that american ceos appear to be taking a proactive stance regarding the international arena the ceos were also found to hold diverse perceptions of ib issues the implications of these findings are discussed

a model of agreements in strategic form games abstract because in a strategic form game all the possibilities of communication available to the players must be explicitly listed in the strategy spaces coalitions and coalitional behaviour are not very often taken into account in noncooperative games however it may be desirable especially in applications to separate the basic strategic features of a situation from those strategic features added as a consequence of the possibility of coalitional behaviour we define an equilibrium for the bargaining procedure called by greenberg the theory of solid situations an alternative game theoretic approach cambridge university press cambridge uk 1990 coalitional contingent threat situation we argue that the crucial problem of expectations on the counterdeviations following a deviation can be addressed by defining coalitional strategies and studying the equilibrium of the extended game journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c70 c71

beyond ecolabels what green marketing can learn from conventional marketing ecolabels have emerged as one of the main tools of green marketing although a great deal of effort has been invested in making them more effective and efficient the market share of ecolabelled products is still low partly because they have been addressed mainly to green consumers in a theoretical exposition of marketing theory we find that green marketing could learn from conventional marketing in discovering other means than labelling to promote green products examples include addressing a wider range of consumers working with the positioning strategies of price place and promotion and actively engaging in market creation

limited farsightedness in network formation pairwise stability jackson and wolinsky 1996 is the standard stability concept in network formation it assumes myopic behavior of the agents in the sense that they do not forecast how others might react to their actions assuming that agents are perfectly farsighted related stability concepts have been proposed we design a simple network formation experiment to test these extreme theories but find evidence against both of them the subjects are consistent with an intermediate rule of behavior which we interpret as a form of limited farsightedness on aggregate the selection among multiple pairwise stable networks and the performance of farsighted stability crucially depends on the level of farsightedness needed to sustain them and not on efficiency or cooperative considerations individual behavior analysis corroborates this interpretation and suggests in general a low level of farsightedness around two steps on the part of the agents

why are similar workers paid differently the role of social networks abstract we provide a matching model where identical workers are embedded in ex ante identical social networks job arrival rate is endogenous and wages are bargained we study the evolution of networks over time and characterize the equilibrium distribution of unemployment rates across networks within our framework wage dispersion arises endogenously as the consequence of the dynamics of networks firms strategies and wage bargaining we show that networks induce new search externalities which shape the dynamics of the labor market our endogenous framework allows us to quantify these effects

logging conflicts in southern cameroon a feminist ecological economics perspective abstract growing attention has been paid to gender in ecological economics political ecology and development studies but a focus on gender in resource extraction conflicts is still rare this article explores women led resistance movements to commercial logging in south eastern cameroon focusing on the moabi tree baillonella toxisperma the latter provides oil medicine and other non timber products and use values to local forest societies and particularly to women resistances arise because most socio environmental costs of the international logging trade are imposed on the rural populations and especially on women of the extractive regions the aim of this paper is to analyze the root causes of the gender structure of such mobilisations as well as the impacts on gender relations induced by such resource extraction conflicts after proposing a typology of different environmental currents and their gender counterparts this paper focuses on the gender construction of local bantu societies taking as a point of departure paola tabet s thesis that masculine control over production tools is the objective factor revealing the sexual division of work in our case study we found that the men s control over technology not only highlights the sexual work division but also the gendered division of access rights to natural resources thereby we argue that the sexual division of access rights and work revealed through differentiated control over technology are two key institutions explaining the gendered structure of local mobilizations we then discuss the empowerment allowed by the new forms of women s organizations with a particular focus on the appropriation of new production tools by women this highlights a non western form of environmental feminism

will women lead the way differences in demand for corporate social responsibility information for investment decisions recent years have featured a leap in academic and public interest in corporate social responsibility csr activities and related corporate reporting two main themes in this literature are the exploration of management incentives to engage in and disclose this information and of the use and value of this information to market participants we extend the second theme by examining the interest that specific investor classes have in the use of csr information we rely on feminist intersectionality which suggests that gender intersects with other identities to yield different values experiences and opportunities that can lead to gender based preferences for csr information based upon a survey of 750 us based retail investors we find that female retail investors have a greater interest in the use of csr information relative to male retail investors women express greater anticipated future demand for this information than do men further the magnitude of the increase from current use to anticipated future demand is greater for women than men age is a significant modifying factor in that the discrepancy between women of any age and older men is greater than that between women and younger men finally women also exhibit greater demand for streamlining of the information flow consistent with pressures induced by time poverty it appears that current disclosure practices provide a less than optimal match with the needs of the information consumers that are primarily interested in using this information this mismatch may result in a systematic disenfranchisement of female investing classes which suggests an ethical need to level the playing field

the collapse of a european bank in the financial crisis an analysis from stakeholder and ethical perspectives fortis the leading benelux financial group had been a success story of successive mergers of bank and insurance companies with leadership in corporate social responsibility csr one year after the acquisition of the major dutch financial conglomerate abn amro the global financial crisis caused the collapse of the fortis group the purpose of this article is to use the case study of fortis s recent fall as a basis for reflective considerations on the financial crisis from stakeholder and ethical perspectives a selected number of key events of the history of the dramatic crisis at fortis will be analysed from different ethical frameworks special consideration will be given to fairness of communication shareholder activism and conflicts of interests of ceo s mergers opportunities a confrontation between the csr policy and the reality raises the fundamental questions why the powerful csr guidelines and ethical principles did not help in the assessment of the risks

farsighted strategies in the formation of a communication network abstract i examine the formation of a specific communication network a variant of the two way flow model in which agents have farsighted strategies i show that the likelihood to form efficient networks tends to zero for sufficiently large network sizes

coalition formation as a dynamic process abstract we study coalition formation as an ongoing dynamic process with payoffs generated as coalitions form disintegrate or regroup a process of coalition formation pcf is an equilibrium if a coalitional move to some other state can be justified by the expectation of higher future value compared to inaction this future value in turn is endogenous it depends on coalitional movements at each node we study existence of equilibrium pcfs we connect deterministic equilibrium pcfs with unique absorbing state to the core and equilibrium pcfs with multiple absorbing states to the largest consistent set in addition we study cyclical as well as stochastic equilibrium pcfs

networks and farsighted stability the main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework in which the notion of farsighted stability for games introduced by chwe 1994 can be applied to directed networks in particular we introduce the notion of a supernetwork a supernetwork is made up of a collection of directed networks the nodes and uniquely represents via the arcs connecting the nodes agent preferences and the rules governing network formation by reformulating chwe s basic result on the nonemptiness of farsightedly stable sets we show that for any supernetwork i e for any collection of directed networks and any collection of rules governing network formation there exists a farsightedly stable directed network we also introduce the notion of a nash network relative to a given supernetwork as well as the notions of symmetric nonsimultaneous and decomposable supernetworks to illustrate the utility of our framework we present several examples of super networks compute the farsightedly stable networks and the nash networks

vertical integration with endogenous contract leadership stability and fair profit allocation abstract this paper studies vertical integration in serial supply chains with a wholesale price contract we consider a business environment where the contracting leader may be endogenously changed before and after forming the integration a cooperative game is formulated to normatively analyze the stable and fair profit allocations under the grand coalition in such an environment our main result demonstrates that vertical integration is stable when all members are pessimistic in the sense that they are sure that they will not become the contracting leader if they deviate from the grand coalition we find that in this case the grand coalition s profit must be allocated more to the retailer and the members with higher costs nevertheless we also show the conditions under which the upstream manufacturer can have strong power as in traditional supply chains

the views of american multinational ceos on internationalized business education for prospective employees for some time a number of industry leaders have been exhorting american business schools to train their students in the aspects of international business as late as 1987 a group of prominent leaders from business labor academia and government issued a report that stated that business schools must internationalize the entire course of study and should include comparative business practices foreign languages and analyses of other countries and cultures

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

individual dynamic managerial capabilities influence over environmental and social commitment under a gender perspective abstract the current business market is characterized by rapid and continuous changes companies should adapt to new situations to guarantee sustainable development managers need to have capabilities to understand the new environment s requirements managers individual dynamic capabilities idc help them face these unpredictable changes in the market however few authors have analysed individual dynamic capabilities to ensure business sustainability this study aims to shed light on the relationship between a manager s idc and business sustainability from a gender perspective a survey of 339 managers was conducted and structural equation modelling sem was applied to study the impact of the relationship the results show that managers individual dynamic capabilities help them detect changes in the market earlier and promote a greater social and environmental commitment from those managers in addition significant differences in the environmental and social commitment between men and women were found therefore this paper first provides advice for developing business sustainability to provide an advantage for organizations second individual dynamic managerial capabilities appear to be important for promoting sustainability finally another step in the construction of gender and sustainability is provided thus this paper provides useful empirical evidence for managerial practice from a strategic management viewpoint

participation games and international environmental agreements a non parametric model abstract we examine the size of stable coalitions in a participation game that has been used to model international environmental agreements cartel formation rd based on these examples a consensus has emerged that in this kind of game the equilibrium coalition size is small except possibly when the potential benefits of cooperation are also small in this paper we develop a non parametric approach to the problem and demonstrate that the conventional wisdom is not robust in a general setting we identify conditions under which the equilibrium coalition size can be large even when potential gains are large contrary to previously examined leading special cases we show that reductions in marginal abatement costs in an international environmental game can increase equilibrium membership and we provide a measure of the smallest reduction in costs needed to support a coalition of arbitrary size

dynamics and stability of constitutions coalitions and clubs a central feature of dynamic collective decision making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions for example current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution may pave the way for further changes in laws and regulations we develop a general framework for the analysis of this class of dynamic problems under relatively natural acyclicity assumptions we provide a complete characterization of dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and determine conditions for their uniqueness we show how this framework can be applied in political economy coalition formation and the analysis of the dynamics of clubs the explicit characterization we provide highlights two intuitive features of dynamic collective decision making 1 a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently many members of the society 2 efficiency enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender

club networks with multiple memberships and noncooperative stability modeling club structures as bipartite directed networks we formulate the problem of club formation with multiple memberships as a noncooperative game of network formation and identify conditions on network formation rules and players network payoffs sufficient to guarantee that the game has a potential function our sufficient conditions require that each player choose freely and unilaterally those clubs he joins and also his activities within those clubs subject to feasibility constraints we refer to our conditions on rules as noncooperative free mobility we also require that players payoffs be additively separable in player specific payoffs and externalities and that payoff externalities a function of club membership club activities and crowding be identical across players externality homogeneity we then show that under these conditions the noncooperative game of club network formation with multiple memberships is a potential game over directed club networks and we discuss the implications of this result

international business education a corporate view as a preliminary step in the internationalization of business school curricula 122 major canadian corporations were surveyed for their views on the importance of various management skills and international courses as well as their opinion on the mechanisms institutions and academics for delivering them this article reports on the responses obtained and suggests methods for improving the overall effectiveness of international business education

gender differences in customer expectations and perceptions of corporate social responsibility abstract the literature on business ethics corporate social responsibility and sustainability includes many studies on gender differences however the results are often contrasting in particular there has not yet been full agreement on the role and significance of gender differences in customer expectations and perceptions of responsible corporate conduct an extensive review of the research on the subject reveals that the published studies have not dealt with the substantive significance of gender differences and as a result the size of such differences is unknown the current study analyses both the statistical and the substantive significance of gender differences in customer expectations and perceptions of corporate responsibility also examining the influence of age and education the analysis is carried out on a remarkably large sample of 908 clients pertaining to 12 of the largest italian banks the overall results show that there is a small substantive difference between women s and men s average expectations with women showing higher average values than men this result holds generally true with variation of education levels and age groups young females show the highest average values of expectations and the significance of gender differences decreases with age in contrast the perception of corporate social responsibility does not show significant gender differences either at the general level or when the analyses are repeated by education levels and age groups the paper introduces the use of a standardized measure of effect size for analysing the substantive significance of gender differences in customer expectations and perceptions of corporate social responsibility this novel approach increases results reliability and accordingly the effectiveness of company or policy maker strategies in designing planning implementing and assessing sustainability initiatives

formation of buyer seller trade networks in a quality differentiated product market we examine the formation of buyer seller links when exchange can take place only if such a link exists sellers produce products of different qualities and multiple sellers can form a sellers association to pool their customers setting uniform prices buyers form trade links with individual sellers or sellers associations we show which buyer seller links will form and find the set of links that are stable and show how these links influence prices we also show that a trade network mismatch may occur where a high quality good remains unsold even without an economy wide excess supply of goods jel classification d40 d51 d82

international business and trade in the next decade report from a delphi study the globalization of business causes major changes in the business environment and in business practices forecasting such changes is crucial for the preparation of responses to them this article reports on a delphi study conducted with a global set of experts drawn from the policy business and academic communities over three rounds of mailings these experts analyzed and debated the likelihood of changes in the international business environment over the next decade and the impact of these changes on corporate practices the findings identify key geographic areas of business growth major sectoral transformations shifts in the trade framework and its institution and strategies for corporate adjustment