Moral Systems in the Regulations of Nonprofits: How Value Commitments Matter

This essay explores how three behavior-shaping systems - legal, market, and moral - influence the fundamental tasks of both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, including organizational goal-setting; motivation of participants; and deterring and reducing abuse of power. After identifying key features of these normative systems and their characteristic differences, the author argues that the influence of moral systems on nonprofit organizations may be underestimated, especially in view of their potentially unifying role with respect to all of the fundamental tasks. He suggests that the prospects for effective reform of nonprofit governance and accountability regimes are improved when the mechanisms and effects of these moral systems are taken into account.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.6. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006

Assessment of site investigation and tunnel contract cost

The thesis concerns the research into the development and application of empirical guidelines regarding the capability of site investigation to define uncertainty in ground conditions and hence to minimise contract cost. The data has been abstracted from the documents of contracts on the Northumbrian Water Authority's Tyneside Sewerage Scheme and, to allow cost comparisons to be made, a system of index-linking costs has been used, which removes their time-dependency. A simplified theoretical approach, based on probability theory and decision analysis, has been included to model the situation of decision under uncertainty and comparisons are subsequently made between this approach and the empirical results. Conclusions are reached regarding the possible reduction in risk, financial uncertainty, with increasing site investigation

Contesting Anticompetitive Actions Taken in the Name of the State: State Action Immunity and Health Care Markets

The so-called state action doctrine is a judicially created formula for resolving conflicts between federal antitrust policy and state policies that seem to authorize conduct that antitrust law would prohibit. Against the background of recent commentaries by the federal antitrust agencies, this article reviews the doctrine and discusses it\u27s application in the health care sector, focusing on the ability of states to immunize anticompetitive actions by state licensing and regulatory boards, hospital medical staffs, and public hospitals, as well as anticompetitive mergers and agreements. Although states are free, as sovereign governments, to restrict competition, the state action doctrine requires that the state itself make the decision to do so. Partly on the basis of problems in the political environment, the article criticizes courts for using a mere forseeability test to decide whether a state legislature sufficiently authorized competitors to act in contravention of clear federal policy: Few things are more foreseeable than that a trade or profession empowered to regulate itself will produce anticompetitive regulations

Antitrust and IPOs in the Supreme Court

This short comment suggests a connection, so far unrecognized, between two antitrust cases currently awaiting decision by the Supreme Court. In one case, the Court is likely, though not certain, to overturn the long-standing rule that resale price maintenance is illegal per se. If that should occur, another case on the Court’s docket, involving the scope of the implied antitrust immunity enjoyed by underwriters of corporate securities offerings, would (or should) look very different. This comment suggests that, if the law of vertical restraints is finally rationalized so that an issuer of a security may lawfully restrict price and other competition among its distributors, the traditional basis for inferring a congressional intention to exempt securities offerings from the Sherman Act (a “clear repugnancy” between two statutory regimes) would at least arguably disappear. Although the justices are unlikely to see the point in the pending case on underwriter immunity, there might be room for future antitrust challenges to horizontal restraints conceived and implemented by underwriters in IPOs