Advisers and the Fiduciary Duty Debate

This work concerns itself with the debate taking place in the United States about the duty of care financial advisers owe investors. On one side it is argued that advisers need only concern themselves with recommendations which meet certain suitability standards. On the other side, there are those who argue the suitability standard is not strong enough to adequately protect investor interests. Instead of ensuring investment recommendations are merely suitable, financial advisers owe their investors a fiduciary duty to “act in the best interest of the customer without regard to the financial or other interests … of the investment adviser providing the advice.” (SEC, 2011). In applying a properly understood conception of what fiduciary means I argue that regulations should not be harmonized but that fiduciary duty should apply to all who provide personalized investment advice to retail customers. I will further argue that even if the regulations are harmonized as proposed, because of exemptions for broker‐dealers as envisioned in the proposal, and which currently apply to Registered Investment Advisers, the efficacy of fiduciary duty is diluted to the point of rendering its current application, much less its potential uniform imposition, irrelevant.     

A Theory of the Stakeholder Corporation

There is a widely held view within the general public that large corporations should act in the interests of a broader group of agents than just their shareholders (the stakeholder view). This paper presents a framework where this idea can be justified. The point of departure is the observation that a large firm typically faces endogenous risks that may have a significant impact on the workers it employs and the consumers it serves. These risks generate externalities on these stakeholders which are not internalized by shareholders. As a result, in the competitive equilibrium, there is under‐investment in the prevention of these risks. We suggest that this under‐investment problem can be alleviated if firms are instructed to maximize the total welfare of their stakeholders rather than shareholder value alone (stakeholder equilibrium). The stakeholder equilibrium can be implemented by introducing new property rights (employee rights and consumer rights) and instructing managers to maximize the total value of the firm (the value of these rights plus shareholder value). If there is only one firm, the stakeholder equilibrium is Pareto optimal. However, this is not true with more than one firm and/or heterogeneous agents, which illustrates some of the limits of the stakeholder model.     

Profit from the Priceless: Heritage Sites,Property Rights and the Duty to Preserve

This article suggests that corporate responsibility should be interpreted to include concern about resources that cannot easily be treated as commodities. Heritage Sites are places of historical and cultural importance. Given the primacy of contingent valuation methods in creating policy, these sites are often at risk from development or tourism since there is pressure to treat them as revenue centers. The article moves to looking at the status of sites in terms of property rights, drawing on Locke's original formulation. The article concludes that there is a normative justification for treating these sites as collective property that may warrant maintenance, preservation and restricted access.     

A Theory of Diversity

How can diversity be measured? What does it mean to value biodiversity? Can we assist Noah in constructing his preferences? To address these questions, we propose a multi‐attribute approach under which the diversity of a set of species is the sum of the values of all attributes possessed by some species in the set. We develop the basic intuitions and requirements for a theory of diversity and show that the multi‐attribute approach satisfies them in a flexible yet tractable manner. A natural starting point is to think of the diversity of a set as an aggregate of the pairwise dissimilarities between its elements. The multi‐attribute framework allows one to make this program formally precise. It is shown that the program can be realized if and only if the family of relevant attributes is well‐ordered (“acyclic”). Moreover, there is a unique functional form aggregating dissimilarity into diversity, the length of a minimum spanning tree. Examples are taxonomic hierarchies and lines representing uni‐dimensional qualities. In multi‐dimensional settings, pairwise dissimilarity information among elements is insufficient to determine their diversity. By consequence, the qualitative and quantitative behavior of diversity differs fundamentally.     

把抓落实作为领导者履职的重要内容

抓落实虽是一个老生常谈的话题,但又是摆在我们面前的一个不得不重视的问题。在我们的党员干部中,仍不同程度地存在着不善抓落实、不会抓落实、不愿抓落实的“顽疾”。一个合格的、优秀的领导干部,首先必须是一个抓落实的行家里手,必须是一个脚踏实地的实干家。为此,笔者认为,各级领导干部必须把抓落实作为履行职责的重要内容,始终坚持在抓落实上下功夫,在抓落实上作表率,在抓落实中创实绩。一抓落实,实际上就是把决策付诸行动,进而取得预期效果的实践过程。想不想抓落实、会不会抓落实、能不能抓落实,是对一个党员干部思想认识、工作方法、…     

A Study to Improve the Method of Ascertaining Attribute Weight Based on Rough Sets Theory

There are some shortages to ascertain attribute weight based on rough set in current studies. In this paper, attrib- ute importance represented by rough set is studied deeply. Aiming at the existing problems, algebra presentation of rough sets is proved to be more comprehensive than its information presentation, then a new method of ascertaining attribute weigh is put forward based on rough set conditional entropy. Finally, it is shown that the new method is more reasonable than the old one by an example.     

A critique of Theory Z

Ouchi's Theory Z prescribes how employees should be motivated for increased productivity. Based on the theoretical work of Emile Durkheim, it views the modern large corporation as a communal alternative to the shortcomings of other institutions in industrial mass society. Ouchi's assertion that Japan is the industrial society in which Theory Z has flourished received limited support from research findings. Moreover, Ouchi's grounding of the theory in humanistic management seem unwarranted.     

为竞争上岗工作解难

近年来,竞争上岗的改革措施在激活机关用人机制、改善机关干部结构、扩大干部工作中的民主、增强机关活力等方面取得了明显成效,并越来越受到广大干部群众的拥护和欢迎.但目前在具体操作中,对有些难点问题把握不准,解决不好,在一定程度上影响了竞争上岗工作推行的力度和效果.     

Optimal Allocation of Effort to Software Maintenance: A Queuing Theory Approach

We develop variations of the M|G|1 queue to model the process of software maintenance within organizations and use these models to compute the optimal allocation of resources to software maintenance. User requests are assumed to arrive following a Poisson process and a binomial distribution is used to model duplication of requests. We obtain expressions for expected queue lengths with an exponential server using an N‐policy for an integer N≥1. We also obtain the optimal batching size and mean service rate by minimizing the total cost consisting of the cost of the server, the cost of waiting, and the fixed cost of maintenance, if applicable.     

A Dynamic Theory of Holdup

The holdup problem arises when parties negotiate to divide the surplus generated by their relationship specific investments. We study this problem in a dynamic model of bargaining and investment which, unlike the stylized static model, allows the parties to continue to invest until they agree on the terms of trade. The investment dynamics overturns the conventional wisdom dramatically. First, the holdup problem need not entail underinvestment when the parties are sufficiently patient. Second, inefficiencies can arise unambiguously in some cases, but they are not caused by the sharing of surplus per se but rather by a failure of an individual rationality constraint.     

A Theory of Intergenerational Altruism

Modeling intergenerational altruism is crucial to evaluate the long‐term consequences of current decisions, and requires a set of principles guiding such altruism. We axiomatically develop a theory of pure, direct altruism: Altruism is pure if it concerns the total utility (rather than the mere consumption utility) of future generations, and direct if it directly incorporates the utility of all future generations. Our axioms deliver a new class of altruistic, forward‐looking preferences, whose weight put on the consumption of a future generation generally depends on the consumption of other generations. The only preferences lacking this dependence correspond to the quasi‐hyperbolic discounting model, which our theory characterizes. Our approach provides a framework to analyze welfare in the presence of altruistic preferences and addresses technical challenges stemming from the interdependent nature of such preferences.     

西方领导理论演变综述

领导是组织行为的一个重要方面。随着社会的发展、管理复杂性的增加和对管理研究的深入,西方领导理论经历了从20世纪的领导特质及行为理论、领导环境理论到20世纪末21世纪初的当代领导理论三个阶段。一、20世纪西方领导理论回顾20世纪上半叶,西方领导理论处于研究的起步阶段,领导理论界一直将领导者的个人品质作为描述和预测其领导行为成效的因素,由此产生了以领导者特有的个人品质为研究重点的领导素质理论,即伟人论观点(又称领导特质理论)。斯多基乐、切斯利、本尼斯等人对此理论的发展做出了较大贡献。从20世纪40年代开始到60年代中期,关…     

Theory as Fantasy: Emotional Dimensions to Grounded Theory

In this paper we discuss emotions and fantasies that inform and influence the project of theory building. Our argument is that theory building can be improved by engaging directly with emotions and with fantasies that are defensively and creatively generated by the researcher. Once acknowledged, these can be transformed into ideas and insights. We provide an example of the emotional dynamics surrounding a novice researcher's use of grounded theory within her doctoral research. We highlight three distinctive researcher fantasies of containment, coherence and purity associated with her experience of the method. We discuss how engagement with these fantasies deepened the researcher's analysis and thereby enhanced the process of building theory from the data. Therefore, our paper contributes to an understanding of how fantasies mobilized by such an open‐ended research method can help to refine our thinking about emerging theory.     

激励合约线性结构的行为合约理论解释

合约理论继承了经济学传统自利偏好假设,却忽略了公平偏好等行为心理因素。为此,在借鉴行为经济学描述公平偏好的FS模型基础上,把公平偏好引入最优激励合约设计的标准框架,以行为合约理论为工具,通过建立离散产出和离散努力模型,研究设计公平偏好下的最优激励合约。分析结果发现,引入公平偏好之后的一级最优和二级最优激励合约都是线性结构的,并且其斜率会随着公平偏好增强而增大,但不会超过0.5。这不但得到了线性结构的激励合约,而且得到了与实证研究结论相一致的关于激励合约斜率性质的理论分析结果,从而为激励合约线性结构提供了一种较合理的理论解释。     

合作与竞争理论的实验研究

广州８０名大学生应邀参加了合作与竞争的实验。我们详细地设计了实验规则、讨论主题 ,以尽力创造出合作或者竞争的实验环境。在不同的实验环境中 ,参加者的行为方式和结果各不相同。在实验的各个阶段 ,参加者还填写了一些问卷 ,反馈自己对各自实验环境的感受。根据问卷的调查得到的数据 ,我们使用定量方法进行了分析。结果表明我们的实验是成功的 ,合作的工作目标有利于增进彼此的关系 ,导致开放、坦诚的交流。采用诱导式的交流方式能取得理想的工作结果。在此基础上我们结合中国传统文化 ,针对合作与竞争理论在中国的应用提出了一些行之有…     

Key to Effective Organizational Performance Management Lies at the Intersection of Paradox Theory and Stakeholder Theory

One of the fundamental and recurring issues in performance management is the adoption of a simplistic, short‐term, narrow, metrics‐oriented approach, which often results in unintended negative outcomes, some of which could be disastrous. This paper makes the case that the key to preventing this syndrome lies at the intersection of paradox and stakeholder theories. Both theories encourage a more complex, long‐term, holistic, balanced approach to management. Stakeholder theory focuses on addressing the many (sometimes conflicting) goals of multiple stakeholders, and paradox theory provides insights into how this challenging task (i.e. of simultaneously addressing multiple conflicting priorities) can be accomplished. Thus, the former provides the ‘what’ and the latter the ‘how’ of effective organizational performance management. Accordingly, the literature at the intersection of both theories (composed of 69 scholarly outputs), was reviewed, and in so doing, identified seven domain areas and 21 constructs, all of which implicitly deal with either performance management or its communication, thereby lending support to this paper's thesis. The implications of this review for both theory and practice, including the role of paradoxical cognitive mechanisms, is discussed.     

食品系统理论研究综述

随着经济的发展和社会分工的细化,围绕着饮食的供需环境日趋复杂化。因此有必要站在国家粮食和食物供给安全的战略高度从整体的视角对食物的供需变化进行系统的研究。食品系统理论以其独特的研究视角在国际学术界日益受到广泛的关注。本文将食品系统理论的相关文献进行了系统的研究,追溯了食品系统研究的起源,明晰了其理论框架和思想背景,探讨了研究热点和研究现状,并指出研究中存在的不足及今后的研究重点。     

A Theory of Production Competence*

Production competence is an enigmatic functional phenomenon. What is it? Can it be measured? Does it affect business performance? The literature barely touches on these issues. If competence is defined as a variable rather than a fixed attribute, it can be measured by how well manufacturing's strengths and weaknesses complement the priorities of the business strategy. Since performance is a measure of how well that strategy works, there should be a definable relationship between competence and performance. This study proposes just such a relationship and promotes production competence as the theoretical link between production process and business strategy.     

A Theory of Optimal Inheritance Taxation

This paper derives optimal inheritance tax formulas that capture the key equity‐efficiency trade‐off, are expressed in terms of estimable sufficient statistics, and are robust to the underlying structure of preferences. We consider dynamic stochastic models with general and heterogeneous bequest tastes and labor productivities. We limit ourselves to simple but realistic linear or two‐bracket tax structures to obtain tractable formulas. We show that long‐run optimal inheritance tax rates can always be expressed in terms of aggregate earnings and bequest elasticities with respect to tax rates, distributional parameters, and social preferences for redistribution. Those results carry over with tractable modifications to (a) the case with social discounting (instead of steady‐state welfare maximization), (b) the case with partly accidental bequests, (c) the standard Barro–Becker dynastic model. The optimal tax rate is positive and quantitatively large if the elasticity of bequests to the tax rate is low, bequest concentration is high, and society cares mostly about those receiving little inheritance. We propose a calibration using micro‐data for France and the United States. We find that, for realistic parameters, the optimal inheritance tax rate might be as large as 50%–60%—or even higher for top bequests, in line with historical experience.     

基于理论演进角度的组织承诺研究综述

结合1960年以前有关对承诺的研究,将组织承诺的发展过程大致划分为背景、兴起,发展和创新四个阶段;基于理论演进的角度,评述不同阶段组织承诺基础的理论根基与来源,关注于组织承诺维度的发展与内涵,探讨不同研究阶段中组织承诺测量方法的区别与联系,分析已有研究中组织承诺的前因变量与结果变量以及组织承诺在不同文化情境中的研究现状;总结组织承诺理论演进过程的发展特征,提出组织承诺未来研究的若干发展方向。