Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics

Sme Inc: Corporate Success And Social Good, Paul Lim, Brendan Barrett, Nils Steinbrecher, Tomoki Fujii, Ted Tschang, Lieven Demeester Jul 2011

Sme Inc: Corporate Success And Social Good, Paul Lim, Brendan Barrett, Nils Steinbrecher, Tomoki Fujii, Ted Tschang, Lieven Demeester

Research Collection School Of Economics

Panel of experts share their views ranging from the definition of sustainable business to how governments should lead by example.


To Trust Or To Monitor: A Dynamic Analysis, Fali Huang Aug 2007

To Trust Or To Monitor: A Dynamic Analysis, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In a principal-agent framework, principals can mitigate moral hazard problems not only through extrinsic incentives such as monitoring, but also through agents’ intrinsic trustworthiness. Their relative usage, however, changes over time and varies across societies. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon by endogenizing agent trustworthiness as a response to potential returns. When monitoring becomes relatively cheaper over time, agents acquire lower trustworthiness, which may actually drive up the overall governance cost in society. Across societies, those giving employees lower weights in choosing governance methods tend to have higher monitoring intensities and lower trust. These results are consistent with the …


Social Trust And Economic Governance, Fali Huang Apr 2004

Social Trust And Economic Governance, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper investigates the dynamic relationship between social trust and economic governance using a principal-agent model with stochastic returns. To mitigate the inherent moral hazard problem both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives are useful. The cooperative tendency of an agent measures his intrinsic discipline against shirking, the distribution of which characterizes social trust in society. The economic governance methods include direct monitoring and efficiency wage. The main results are the following. An agent with a higher cooperative tendency needs less monitoring and a lower wage to make effort, which brings higher profit for the principal. But competition among principals for more …


Social Trust, Cooperation, And Human Capital, Fali Huang Jan 2004

Social Trust, Cooperation, And Human Capital, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The importance of social trust on economic growth has been suggested by many empirical works. This paper formalizes the concept of social trust and studies its formation process in a game theoretic setting. It provides plausible explanations for a wide range of empirical and experimental findings. The main results of the paper are as follows. For utility-maximizing players, cooperation arises in one-period prisoner’s dilemmas if and only if there is social trust. The amount of social trust in a given game is determined by the distribution of players’ cooperative tendency. Cooperative tendency is in essence a component of human capital …