The Role of Individual Variables, Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world

Election proximity and representation focus in party-constrained environments

Do elected representatives have a time-constant representation focus or do they adapt their focus depending on election proximity? In this article, we examine these overlooked theoretical and empirical puzzles by looking at how reelection-seeking actors adapt their legislative behavior according to the electoral cycle. In parliamentary democracies, representatives need to serve two competing principals: their party and their district. Our analysis hinges on how representatives make a strategic use of parliamentary written questions in a highly party-constrained institutional context to heighten their reselection and reelection prospects. Using an original data set of over 32,000 parliamentary questions tabled by Portuguese representatives from 2005 to 2015, we examine how time interacts with two key explanatory elements: electoral vulnerability and party size. Results show that representation focus is not static over time and, in addition, that electoral vulnerability and party size shape strategic use of parliamentary questions

Mode of Effective Connectivity within a Putative Neural Network Differentiates Moral Cognitions Related to Care and Justice Ethics

BACKGROUND: Moral sensitivity refers to the interpretive awareness of moral conflict and can be justice or care oriented. Justice ethics is associated primarily with human rights and the application of moral rules, whereas care ethics is related to human needs and a situational approach involving social emotions. Among the core brain regions involved in moral issue processing are: medial prefrontal cortex, anterior (ACC) and posterior (PCC) cingulate cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), insula and amygdala. This study sought to inform the long standing debate of whether care and justice moral ethics represent one or two different forms of cognition. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Model-free and model-based connectivity analysis were used to identify functional neural networks underlying care and justice ethics for a moral sensitivity task. In addition to modest differences in patterns of associated neural activity, distinct modes of functional and effective connectivity were observed for moral sensitivity for care and justice issues that were modulated by individual variation in moral ability. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These results support a neurobiological differentiation between care and justice ethics and suggest that human moral behavior reflects the outcome of integrating opposing rule-based, self-other perspectives, and emotional responses

Rational exaggeration and counter-exaggeration in information aggregation games

We study an information aggregation game in which each of a finite collection of “senders” receives a private signal and submits a report to the center, who then makes a decision based on the average of these reports. The integration of three features distinguishes our framework from the related literature: players’ reports are aggregated by a mechanistic averaging rule, their strategy sets are intervals rather than binary choices, and they are ex ante heterogeneous. In this setting, players engage in a “tug-of-war,” as they exaggerate and counter-exaggerate in order to manipulate the center’s decision. While incentives to exaggerate have been studied extensively, the phenomenon of counter-exaggeration is less well understood. Our main results are as follows. First, the cycle of counter-exaggeration can be broken only by the imposition of exogenous bounds on the space of admissible sender reports. Second, in the unique pure-strategy equilibrium, all but at most one player is constrained with positive probability by one of the report bounds. Our third and fourth results hold for a class of “anchored” games. We show that if the report space is strictly contained in the signal space, then welfare is increasing in the size of the report space, but if the containment relation is reversed, welfare is independent of the size of the space. Finally, the equilibrium performance of our heterogeneous players can be unambiguously ranked: a player’s equilibrium payoff is inversely related to the probability that her exaggeration will be thwarted by the report bounds