How can office-seeking politicians or managers be aligned with social welfare or firm welfare, given that such agents have a suboptimal incentive to cater to majority preferences in situations with low participation costs and to elite preferences in situations with high participation costs? In...

This article examines corporate bailouts from several ethical perspectives. Utilitarian analysis concludes that bailouts cannot be ethically justified because the losers exceed the winners. Applying rights theory reaches the same conclusion for different reasons

Executive managers' remuneration has been an issue of debate for the last 30 years. Practitioners and academics are arguing for the mechanisms, mix, level, time horizon and goal. Disclosure or not of information regarding these issues preoccupies regulating, legislative authorities as well as...

This paper is the first chapter of the third edition of The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach, by Reinier Kraakman, John Armour, Paul Davies, Luca Enriques, Henry Hansmann, Gerard Hertig, Klaus Hopt, Hideki Kanda Mariana Pargendler, Georg Ringe, and Edward Rock...

The regulation of executive compensation is like the phoenix of corporate debate. Every once in a while it rises from the ashes, dominates public debate with strong statements regarding efficiency, justice, and what managers "deserve" - and returns to rest until the next time populist sentiments...

Agents are either guided directly by the elicited or communicated preferences of their principals, including both the conditions or states that their principals value and the particular actions the principals prefer that agents use to realize those states (goal priority), or can research clues...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is here defined as a multi-stakeholder model of corporate governance and fiduciary duties naturally emerging from a critical assessment of the incomplete contracts view of the firm based on concepts like as authority and residual rights of control. As far as...

That individuals contribute in social dilemma interactions even when contributing is costly is a well-established observation in the experimental literature. Since a contributor is always strictly worse off than a non-contributor the question is raised if an intrinsic motivation to contribute...

“Ordonomics” is a research program that has been developed at the Chair of Economic Ethics at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. It holds that business actors (persons and organizations) can employ morality as a “factor of production”, and that business ethics can be based on a...

When firms decide to engage in the provision of collective goods that benefit social welfare (i.e., to behave prosocially), they may consider the economic relevance of such goods for their own market operation. The bigger the stake of the firm in a given market, the greater its reliance on the...