Negative Dimensions of Identity: A Research Agenda for Law and Public Policy

Legal scholarship has long concerned itself with race, gender, and other core identities. Economics, and law and economics, is now turning its attention to other dimensions of identity. What is identity? Identity is a person\u27s sense of self. \u27 Identity has genetic, cultural and neural bases grounded in an evolutionary process.\u27 Identity helps individuals make sense of themselves and provides a feeling of grounding or belonging. There are many potential identity dimensions, including gender, facial features, and height, as well as religion, ethnicity, social-group affiliation, sports-team loyalty, family, profession, artistic preferences, culinary preferences, and place of origin. The significance of different dimensions varies across individuals; some people derive a stronger sense of identity from their religion, others from their sports team fanship, others from their occupation, and so on

WORKPLACE ORGANIZATION AND HUMAN RESOURCE PRACTICES: THE RETAIL FOOD INDUSTRY

Most retail food firms adhere to traditional human resources management practices, with employees enjoying little involvement in decision-making and little participation in company financial returns. More than one tenth of non-food firms have innovative human resources systems, with much individual and group involvement in decision-making and financial returns, but only a minuscule proportion of food firms have such systems. At the other end of the spectrum, more than one-fifth of food stores and eating and drinking places (and nearly one-third of food wholesale firms) have traditional systems, as compared to only one-tenth of non-food firms. The tasks and the human resource practices typical of retail food firms are consistent with each other. Core employees in these firms perform tasks that are generally simpler and less variable than those in other industries, and the firms' human resource practices generally give workers less autonomy and incentives than those in other industries. Whether the structure and variability of tasks are the result of a particular business strategy or adoption of a certain technology is not known. Which came first, these simple tasks, the workers who perform them, or these human resource policies is similarly unknown. We arrive at these conclusions through analysis of an original data set composed of 806 Minnesota firms, including 211 food firms, which allows us to characterize the change in human resource practices since the early 1980s, and to examine differences in the organization of work across companies. Work organization and human resource practices in the retail food industry have changed substantially, although the change has been less pronounced than in most other industries.Labor and Human Capital, Marketing,

Managerial Payoff and Gift Exchange in the Field

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. The results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage gift and the agent's ability to repay the gift. We collect information on ability to control for differences and on reciprocal inclination to show that gift exchange is more effective with more reciprocal agents. We present a simple principal-agent model with reciprocal subjects that motivates our empirical findings. Our results offer an avenue to reconcile the recent conflicting evidence on the efficacy of gift exchange outside the lab; we suggest that the significance of gift exchange relations depends on details of the environment

Why Social Enterprises Are Asking to Be Multi-stakeholder and Deliberative: An Explanation around the Costs of Exclusion.

The study of multi-stakeholdership (and multi-stakeholder social enterprises in particular) is only at the start. Entrepreneurial choices which have emerged spontaneously, as well as the first legal frameworks approved in this direction, lack an adequate theoretical support. The debate itself is underdeveloped, as the existing understanding of organisations and their aims resist an inclusive, public interest view of enterprise. Our contribution aims at enriching the thin theoretical reflections on multi-stakeholdership, in a context where they are already established, i.e. that of social and personal services. The aim is to provide an economic justification on why the governance structure and decision-making praxis of the firm needs to account for multiple stakeholders. In particular with our analysis we want: a) to consider production and the role of firms in the context of the “public interest” which may or may not coincide with the non-profit objective; b) to ground the explanation of firm governance and processes upon the nature of production and the interconnections between demand and supply side; c) to explain that the costs associated with multi-stakeholder governance and deliberation in decision-making can increase internal efficiency and be “productive” since they lower internal costs and utilise resources that otherwise would go astray. The key insight of this work is that, differently from major interpretations, property costs should be compared with a more comprehensive range of costs, such as the social costs that emerge when the supply of social and personal services is insufficient or when the identification of aims and means is not shared amongst stakeholders. Our model highlights that when social costs derived from exclusion are high, even an enterprise with costly decisional processes, such as the multistakeholder, can be the most efficient solution amongst other possible alternatives

Trust in financial services: Retrospect and prospect

Fostering and maintaining high levels of trust in the financial services sector is seen as crucial because of the characteristics of many financial service and in order to promote consumer engagement in the sector. In this article, we report evidence from a body of work and other commentary to provide an insight into trends in consumer trust in the sector as a whole, in comparison with other organisations and how different types of financial services provider have performed relative to each other. We show that the financial services sector as a whole is trusted more than some comparator institutions, and that aggregate levels of trust in the sector have fluctuated a relatively small amount subsequent to the financial crisis. However, important differences between provider types are apparent and these differences have become more profound in the recent past. We provide suggestions as to how trust in the sector may be improved and provider an analysis of current initiatives to improve trust levels in the sector in general and in banking in particular

Measuring Individual Risk Attitudes in the Lab: Task or Ask? An Empirical Comparison

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (forthcoming) - with respect to (a) their correlation with actual risk-taking behaviour in the lab - here the amount sent in a trust game, and (b) their within-subject stability over time (one year). As it turns out, only the questionnaire measure is correlated with actual risk-taking behaviour (both studies) and with the Big Five personality measure (gathered prior to study 1); and the measures themselves are uncorrelated (both studies). Most importantly, however, both individual risk-taking behaviour and the questionnaire measure exhibit a significant high test-retest stability (r = 0:70 and r = 0:79, resp.), while virtually no such stability is present in the lottery-choice task. Thus, the results suggest that the questionnaire measure is more reliable in eliciting individual risk attitudes than the lottery-choice task. Moreover, with respect to trust, the data further support the conjecture that trusting behaviour indeed has a component which itself is a stable individual characteristic (Glaeser, Laibson, Scheinkman and Soutter, 2000)