Orchestrating corporate social responsibility in the multinational enterprise

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) invest significant resources in corporate social responsibility (CSR), but their attempts to build a global “social brand” may clash with the execution of operational strategies at a subsidiary level. Using a game-theoretic model, this research addresses the complex interplay of different contingencies that shape the coordination and control challenges facing MNEs when they implement global CSR strategies, including brand spillovers, the risk of public scandals caused by irresponsible behavior, the size of the MNE network, as well as the roles played by non-governmental organizations and altruistic managers. Challenging the view of CSR as insurance against lapses of responsible conduct, our model shows that investment in social brands helps avoid irresponsible practices across the MNE network, thereby inducing subsidiaries to “walk the talk”

The Ultimate Solution to the Quantum Battle of the Sexes game

We present the unique solution to the Quantum Battle of the Sexes game. We show the best result which can be reached when the game is played according to Marinatto and Weber's scheme. The result which we put forward does not surrender the criticism of previous works on the same topic.Comment: 8 page

Bayesian Nash Equilibria and Bell Inequalities

Games with incomplete information are formulated in a multi-sector probability matrix formalism that can cope with quantum as well as classical strategies. An analysis of classical and quantum strategy in a multi-sector extension of the game of Battle of Sexes clarifies the two distinct roles of nonlocal strategies, and establish the direct link between the true quantum gain of game's payoff and the breaking of Bell inequalities.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX JPSJ 2 column format, changes in sections 1, 3 and 4, added reference

Sustainable synthesis of enantiopure fluorolactam derivatives by a selective direct fluorination – amidase strategy

Pharmaceutically important chiral fluorolactam derivatives bearing a fluorine atom at a stereogenic centre were synthesized by a route involving copper catalyzed selective direct fluorination using fluorine gas for the construction of the key C–F bond and a biochemical amidase process for the crucial asymmetric cyclisation stage. A comparison of process green metrics with reported palladium catalyzed enantioselective fluorination methodology shows the fluorination-amidase route to be very efficient and more suitable for scale-up

Why the Realist-Instrumentalist Debate about Rational Choice Rests on a Mistake

Within the social sciences, much controversy exists about which status should be ascribed to the rationality assumption that forms the core of rational choice theories. Whilst realists argue that the rationality assumption is an empirical claim which describes real processes that cause individual action, instrumentalists maintain that it amounts to nothing more than an analytically set axiom or ‘as if’ hypothesis which helps in the generation of accurate predictions. In this paper, I argue that this realist-instrumentalist debate about rational choice theory can be overcome once it is realised that the rationality assumption is neither an empirical description nor an ‘as if’ hypothesis, but a normative claim

Utilitarian Collective Choice and Voting

In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrow’s theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrow’s theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation of preferences being explicitly rejected. In this paper I point out that all voting methods are cardinal and therefore outside the reach of Arrow’s result. Parallel to Arrow’s ordinal approach, there evolved a consistent cardinal theory of collective choice. This theory, most prominently associated with the work of Harsanyi, continued the older utilitarian tradition in a more formal style. The purpose of this paper is to show that various derivations of utilitarian SWFs can also be used to derive utilitarian voting (UV). By this I mean a voting rule that allows the voter to score each alternative in accordance with a given scale. UV-k indicates a scale with k distinct values. The general theory leaves k to be determined on pragmatic grounds. A (1,0) scale gives approval voting. I prefer the scale (1,0,-1) and refer to the resulting voting rule as evaluative voting. A conclusion of the paper is that the defects of conventional voting methods result not from Arrow’s theorem, but rather from restrictions imposed on voters’ expression of their preferences. The analysis is extended to strategic voting, utilizing a novel set of assumptions regarding voter behavior

Abundance recovery error analysis using simulated AVIRIS data

Measurement noise and imperfect atmospheric correction translate directly into errors in the determination of the surficial abundance of materials from imaging spectrometer data. The effects of errors on abundance recovery were investigated previously using Monte Carlo simulation methods by Sabol et. al. The drawback of the Monte Carlo approach is that thousands of trials are needed to develop good statistics on the probable error in abundance recovery. This computational burden invariably limits the number of scenarios of interest that can practically be investigated. A more efficient approach is based on covariance analysis. The covariance analysis approach expresses errors in abundance as a function of noise in the spectral measurements and provides a closed form result eliminating the need for multiple trials. Monte Carlo simulation and covariance analysis are used to predict confidence limits for abundance recovery for a scenario which is modeled as being derived from Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS)

Strategy abundance in 2x2 games for arbitrary mutation rates

We study evolutionary game dynamics in a well-mixed populations of finite size, N. A well-mixed population means that any two individuals are equally likely to interact. In particular we consider the average abundances of two strategies, A and B, under mutation and selection. The game dynamical interaction between the two strategies is given by the 2x2 payoff matrix [(a,b), (c,d)]. It has previously been shown that A is more abundant than B, if (N-2)a+Nb>Nc+(N-2)d. This result has been derived for particular stochastic processes that operate either in the limit of asymptotically small mutation rates or in the limit of weak selection. Here we show that this result holds in fact for a wide class of stochastic birth-death processes for arbitrary mutation rate and for any intensity of selection.Comment: version 2 is the final published version that contains minor changes in response to referee comment

Sequential Deliberation for Social Choice

In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical. How then can we design a mechanism - preferably decentralized, simple, scalable, and not requiring any special knowledge of the decision space - to reach consensus? We propose sequential deliberation as a natural solution to this problem. In this iterative method, successive pairs of agents bargain over the decision space using the previous decision as a disagreement alternative. We describe the general method and analyze the quality of its outcome when the space of preferences define a median graph. We show that sequential deliberation finds a 1.208- approximation to the optimal social cost on such graphs, coming very close to this value with only a small constant number of agents sampled from the population. We also show lower bounds on simpler classes of mechanisms to justify our design choices. We further show that sequential deliberation is ex-post Pareto efficient and has truthful reporting as an equilibrium of the induced extensive form game. We finally show that for general metric spaces, the second moment of of the distribution of social cost of the outcomes produced by sequential deliberation is also bounded

Voting and the Cardinal Aggregation of Judgments

The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been unproblematic whenever it has been based on an independent and unrestricted scale. The scales analyzed in voting theory are either context dependent or subject to unreasonable restrictions. This is the real source of the diverse 'paradoxes of voting' that would better be termed 'voting pathologies'. The theory leads me to advocate what I term evaluative voting. It can also be called utilitarian voting as it is based on having voters express their cardinal preferences. The alternative that maximizes the sum wins. This proposal operationalizes, in an election context, the abstract cardinal theories of collective choice due to Fleming and Harsanyi. On pragmatic grounds, I argue for a three valued scale for general elections