3,674 research outputs found
Strategic and moral motivation for corporate social responsibility
This article examines the relationship between managementâs view on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firmsâ actual CSR efforts. It focuses on the practices of 111 Dutch firms with respect to five stakeholder groupsâemployees, supplies, customers, competitors and society at largeâand their use of organisational instruments. We find that the moral (intrinsic) motive, which holds that CSR is a moral duty of companies towards society, induces a stronger involvement in CSR than the strategic (extrinsic) motive, which holds that CSR contributes to the financial success of the company in the long run. This particularly applies to ethical aspects of employee relations and the use of instruments to integrate CSR in the companyâs organisation. With respect to consumer relations, the strategic and moral motives are equally important. As for relations with suppliers and competitors and society at large, we do not find a significant relationship between managementâs strategic and moral view on CSR and actual CSR performance.Moral motivation
N=8 Supergravity on the Light Cone
We construct the generating functional for the light-cone superfield
amplitudes in a chiral momentum superspace. It generates the n-point particle
amplitudes which on shell are equivalent to the covariant ones. Based on the
action depending on unconstrained light-cone chiral scalar superfield, this
functional provides a regular d=4 QFT path integral derivation of the Nair-type
amplitude constructions.
By performing a Fourier transform into the light-cone chiral coordinate
superspace we find that the quantum corrections to the superfield amplitudes
with n legs are non-local in transverse directions for the diagrams with the
number of loops smaller than n(n-1)/2 +1. This suggests the reason why UV
infinities, which are proportional to local vertices, cannot appear at least
before 7 loops in the light-cone supergraph computations. By combining the E7
symmetry with the supersymmetric recursion relations we argue that the
light-cone supergraphs predict all loop finiteness of d=4 N=8 supergravity.Comment: 38
Strategies and instruments for organising CSR by small and large businesses in the Netherlands
This paper analyses the use of strategies and instruments for organising ethics by small and large business in the Netherlands. We find that large firms mostly prefer an integrity strategy to foster ethical behaviour in the organisation, whereas small enterprises prefer a dialogue strategy. Both large and small firms make least use of a compliance strategy that focuses on controlling and sanctioning the ethical behaviour of workers. The size of the business is found to have a positive impact on the use of several instruments, like code of conduct, ISO certification, social reporting, social handbook and confidential person. Also being a subsidiary of a larger firm has a significant positive influence on the use of instruments. The most popular instrument used by small firms is to let one member of the board be answerable for ethical questions, which fits the informal culture of most small firms. With respect to 2 sectorial differences, we find that firms in the metal manufacturing and construction sectors are more actively using formal instruments than firms in the financial service sector and retail sector. The distinction between family and non-family firms hardly affects the use of instruments.Comparison of small and large firms; ethics strategies; ethics instruments; organisation of corporate social responsibility
Spillover effects of supplementary on basic health insurance: evidence from the Netherlands
Like many other countries, the Netherlands has a health insurance system that combines mandatory basic insurance with voluntary supplementary insurance. Both types of insurance are founded on different principles. Since basic and supplementary insurance are sold by the same health insurers, both markets may interact. This paper examines to what extent basic and supplementary insurance are linked to each other and whether these links generate spillover effects of supplementary on basic insurance. Our analysis is based on an investigation into supplementary health insurance contracts, underwriting procedures and annual surveys among 1,700â2,100 respondents over the period 2006â2009. We find that health insurers increasingly use a variety of strategies to enforce a joint purchase of basic and supplementary health insurance. Despite incentives for health insurers to use supplementary insurance as a tool for risk selection in basic insurance, we find limited evidence of supplementary insurance being used this way. Only a minority of health insurers uses health questionnaires when people apply for supplementary coverage. Nevertheless, we find that an increasing proportion of high-risk individuals believe that insurers would not be willing to offer them another supplementary insurance contract. We discuss several strategies to prevent or to counteract the observed negative spillover effects of supplementary insurance
Managing appointment booking under customer choices
Motivated by the increasing use of online appointment booking platforms, we study how to offer appointment slots to customers in order to maximize the total number of slots booked. We develop two models, non-sequential offering and sequential offering, to capture different types of interactions between customers and the scheduling system. In these two models, the scheduler offers either a single set of appointment slots for the arriving customer to choose from, or multiple sets in sequence, respectively. For the non-sequential model, we identify a static randomized policy which is asymptotically optimal when the system demand and capacity increase simultaneously, and we further show that offering all available slots at all times has a constant factor of 2 performance guarantee. For the sequential model, we derive a closed-form optimal policy for a large class of instances and develop a simple, effective heuristic for those instances without an explicit optimal policy. By comparing these two models, our study generates useful operational insights for improving the current appointment booking processes. In particular, our analysis reveals an interesting equivalence between the sequential offering model and the non-sequential offering model with perfect customer preference information. This equivalence allows us to apply sequential offering in a wide range of interactive scheduling contexts. Our extensive numerical study shows that sequential offering can significantly improve the slot fill rate (6-8% on average and up to 18% in our testing cases) compared to non-sequential offering
Managing appointment booking under customer choices
Motivated by the increasing use of online appointment booking platforms, we study how to offer appointment slots to customers to maximize the total number of slots booked. We develop two models, nonsequential offering and sequential offering, to capture different types of interactions between customers and the scheduling system. In these two models, the scheduler offers either a single set of appointment slots for the arriving customer to choose from or multiple sets in sequence, respectively. For the nonsequential model, we identify a static randomized policy, which is asymptotically optimal when the system demand and capacity increase simultaneously, and we further show that offering all available slots at all times has a constant factor of two performance guarantee. For the sequential model, we derive a closed form optimal policy for a large class of instances and develop a simple, effective heuristic for those instances without an explicit optimal policy. By comparing these two models, our study generates useful operational insights for improving the current appointment booking processes. In particular, our analysis reveals an interesting equivalence between the sequential offering model and the nonsequential offering model with perfect customer preference information. This equivalence allows us to apply sequential offering in a wide range of interactive scheduling contexts. Our extensive numerical study shows that sequential offering can significantly improve the slot fill rate (6%\xe2\x80\x938% on average and up to 18% in our testing cases) compared with nonsequential offering. Given the recent and ongoing growth of online and mobile appointment booking platforms, our research findings can be particularly useful to inform user interface design of these booking platforms
Strategic and moral motivation for corporate social responsibility
This article examines the relationship between managementâs view on corporate
social responsibility (CSR) and firmsâ actual CSR efforts. It focuses on the practices
of 111 Dutch firms with respect to five stakeholder groupsâemployees, supplies, customers,
competitors and society at largeâand their use of organisational instruments.
We find that the moral (intrinsic) motive, which holds that CSR is a moral duty
of companies towards society, induces a stronger involvement in CSR than the strategic
(extrinsic) motive, which holds that CSR contributes to the financial success of
the company in the long run. This particularly applies to ethical aspects of employee
relations and the use of instruments to integrate CSR in the companyâs organisation.
With respect to consumer relations, the strategic and moral motives are equally
important. As for relations with suppliers and competitors and society at large, we
do not find a significant relationship between managementâs strategic and moral
view on CSR and actual CSR performance
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