Welfare, Dialectic, and Mediation in Corporate Law

Bill Klein extends an idealistic and progressive invitation with the Criteria for Good Laws of Business Association (the Criteria). The structure of our debates, he says, prevents us from joining the issue. The discourse will move forward if we can isolate core components on which we agree and disagree. The invitation, thus directed, is well-constructed. To facilitate engagement, each criterion is set out as pari passu with each other. And there is a good reason for the inclusion of each listed criterion. Each has an established place in public and private law jurisprudence. Each has influenced results, coming forth as salient in one or another area of law, in one or another regulation or case. We can, then, agree in the abstract to take each criterion seriously. Klein bids us then to cull, modify, and restate, so as to identify more clearly the goals we hold out for corporate law. The remainder of this essay takes up that invitation, taking our debates to the Criteria, taking the Criteria to our debates, and taking both to the law itself. It suggests that the criteria on which we can agree lie at a higher level of generality than the Criteria: corporate law makes us all welfare consequentialists who agree that good corporate law is about encouraging productivity. We differ over the means to that end in debates that have over time evolved away from the ideological and toward the functional. Absent an ex ante set of empirically verifiable formulas for productive business organization, we are left to our debates

Financial Decision Making, Price, and Consumer Financial Well-being: A Multiple Methodology Inquiry of the Cognitions, Emotional Coping Responses, and Brand Measures in the Healthcare Service Industry

Article 1: Financial bankruptcy, particularly those as a result of healthcare expenses, has become a pervasive issue in the United States. This article examines a basic premise for the research, that healthcare is not viewed, by consumers, consistently with other exchanges, leading to detachment and disengagement within the purchase experience (e.g., a lack of price searching and price comparison behaviors) and disadvantageous consequences for financial well-being. Subsequently, the studies test cognitive (i.e., knowledge structures) and emotional constructs (i.e., emotion regulation), with a between-subjects experimental methodology (three studies), that may further unfurl the decision process for healthcare consumers. Contributions to the marketing, psychology, and public policy literatures yield implications for marketers and public policy makers, which are discussed subsequently.;Article 2: A qualitative exploration of mindfulness and emotion regulation is proffered, in an effort to identify and understand the cognitive processes used by consumers during healthcare financial decision making. Two complementary methodologies (i.e., stimulated recall, think-aloud protocol) are used for data collection, and two rounds of coding analysis offer themes which inform the literatures of psychology and marketing. Data from 16 participants supports the proposal of a preliminary framework. Implications for marketers and public policy makers are discussed.;Article 3: Healthcare organizations (HCO) are a critical portion of the continually burgeoning healthcare industry. Recent revenue estimates for the industry now exceed {dollar}3 trillion in the U.S. (Phillips 2015). As such, HCOs, embedded within a unique service context, have turned their attention and resources towards managing, cultivating, and promoting their brands. Brand equity and brand image are examined for their impact on price (i.e., average charge price ), a dependent variable derived from data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and price premiums within the healthcare industry. Implications for the theory of services marketing and healthcare marketing are discussed, as well as for managers

Fighting austerity: Why after 80 years the General Theory is still relevant today,

The guiding spirit of the Keynesian Revolution is that full employment is a goal which can be pursued not by following the free market rules, but by reshaping them by means of public intervention. This message was widely accepted for thirty years as from the end of the Second World War by all the advanced countries which actively engaged in full employment and welfare policies, and subsequently abandoned with the neo-liberal Restoration which saw the dogmas of individualism and de-regulation prevailing. In reclaiming the topical importance of the General Theory, we should take into consideration the changed circumstances of today’s world when compared to those of twenty – let alone eighty – years ago, although there are notable similarities between the Great Depression of the 1930s – Keynes’s world – and our contemporary crisis. However, his prescription for a better society is still relevant: it lies in setting rules and limitations in the market arena, not letting individual self-interest prevail, and putting some governing bodies in charge of filling the gap when deficient aggregate demand occurs, so that the acquisition of material goods and the fruition of the enjoyments of life be not a privilege of the few but the conquest of civilization