Fairness, Character, and Efficiency in Firms

Agency problems beset firms and prompt opportunistic behavior by employees. Opportunistic behavior redistributes value, whereas cooperative behavior creates value. Firm-specific fairness norms typically promote the firm’s efficiency by increasing cooperation and decreasing opportunism. Firm-specific fairness norms best promote efficiency when supported by reputation effects and when the firm’s agents internalize the norms. People who internalize norms acquire good character. We will develop the concept of “good agent character,” by which we mean agent character that serves the firm’s profitability by embodying the firm’s fairness norms. Good agent character conveys an advantage to superiors and subordinates in forming cooperative relations with other people who can read character

Determinants of the duration of European appellate court proceedings in cartel cases

The duration of appellate court proceedings is an important determinant of the efficiency of a court system. We use data of 234 firm groups that participated in 63 cartels convicted by the European Commission between 2000 and 2012 to investigate the determinants of the duration of the subsequent one- or two-stage appeals process. We find that while the speed of the firststage appellate court decision depends on the court’s appeals-related workload, the complexity of the case, the degree of cooperation by the firms involved and the clarity of the applied rules and regulations, the second-stage appellate court proceedings appear to be largely unaffected by those drivers. We take our empirical results to derive conclusions for both firms that plan to file an appeal as well as public policy makers

Justice: Greater Access, Lower Costs

Litigation imposes large costs on society; this justifies settlement considerations. In any case, access to justice is critical to socioeconomic development; as such, it needs to be balanced with litigation minimization. This study examines the tradeoff between litigation and access to justice and explicitly elucidates their relationship. In considering access issues, this study finds that the outcomes of policies that affect parties’ litigation decisions partially depart from those in the standard literature. For instance, increasing parties’ litigation costs does not necessarily promote settlement in the shadow of the court. Rather, effects depend on the elasticity of the demand for legal remedies. Furthermore, even while pushing litigation, enhancing access to justice is efficient as long as the claimant’s marginal propensity to litigate is smaller than the social opportunity-cost of access to justice. This finding offers further insight into the suitability of litigation subsidization through legal aid

Equidad, perfil y eficiencia en las sociedades

El presente texto nos hace una reseña acerca de los puntos importantes que debe de tener en cuenta una sociedad para seleccionar a un agente capaz, el cual tenga un perfil positivo. Además se establecen las distintas vertientes que presenta la equidad, las cuales se manifiestan en la lealtad hacia la sociedad y el rendimiento supra contractual, el cual es desarrollado de modo eficiente cuando hay un cierto nivel de confianza en el desarrollo de las actividades de la sociedad