Beyond Bathsheba: Managing Ethical Climates Through Pragmatic Ethics

This paper explores the puzzling nature of leader behavior in order to understand the conditions that encourage unethical decision-making. Building on the extant literature of pragmatic ethics, I explore how leaders can increase the quality of ethical decision-making within their organizations by understanding the incentives of rational choice. I have developed a rational choice-based ethical decision-making model to understand the incentives behind ethical leader behavior and find that ethical behavior is likely to be rational as long as audience costs remain higher than the savings benefits incurred by unethical behavior. I conclude with analysis of how the ethical rational model compares to other prominent theories that explain unethical leader behavior and propose that the probable outcomes derived from my model better explain bad leader behavior than competing control-oriented models. The results of this inquiry underscore the transactional and practical characteristics of leadership as a tool to help leaders manage their ethical climates, improve business practices and management policies, understand the nature of individual incentives, and capture transactional components of leader behavior

Incentives for Boundedly Rational Agents.

This paper develops a theoretical framework for analyzing incentive schemes under bounded rationality. It starts from a standard principal-agent model and then superimposes an assumption of boundedly rational behavior on the part of the agent. Boundedly rational behavior is modeled as an explicit optimization procedure which combines gradient dynamics with a specific form of social learning called imitation of scope.RATIONALITY ; ECONOMIC MODELS ; BEHAVIOUR

Comment: The Identification Power of Equilibrium in Simple Games

This paper studies the identification of structural parameters in dynamic games when we replace the assumption of Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) with weaker conditions such as rational behavior and rationalizability. The identification of players' time discount factors is of especial interest. I present identification results for a simple two-periods/two-players dynamic game of market entry-exit. Under the assumption of level-2 rationality (i.e., players are rational and they know that they are rational), a exclusion restriction and a large-support condition on one of the exogenous explanatory variables are sufficient for point-identification of all the structural parameters.Identification, Empirical dynamic discrete games, Rational behavior, Rationalizability.

Rational curves on Fermat hypersurfaces

In this note we study rational curves on degree $p^r+1$ Fermat hypersurface in \PP^{p^r+1}_k, where $k$ is an algebraically closed field of characteristic $p$. The key point is that the presence of Frobenius morphism makes the behavior of rational curves to be very different from that of charateristic 0. We show that if there exists $N_0$ such that for all $e\geq N_0$ there is a degree $e$ very free rational curve on $X$, then $N_0> p^r(p^r-1)$.Comment: 4 page

Deformation invariance of rational pairs

Rational pairs, recently introduced by Koll\'ar and Kov\'acs, generalize rational singularities to pairs $(X,D)$. Here $X$ is a normal variety and $D$ is a reduced divisor on $X$. Integral to the definition of a rational pair is the notion of a thrifty resolution, also defined by Koll\'ar and Kov\'acs, and in order to work with rational pairs it is often necessary to know whether a given resolution is thrifty. In this paper we present several foundational results that are helpful for identifying thrifty resolutions and analyzing their behavior. We also show that general hyperplane sections of rational pairs are again rational. In 1978, Elkik proved that rational singularities are deformation invariant. Our main result is an analogue of this theorem for rational pairs: given a flat family $X\to S$ and a Cartier divisor $D$ on $X$, if the fibers over a smooth point $s\in S$ form a rational pair, then $(X,D)$ is also rational near the fiber $X_s$.Comment: 17 pages. Version 3: added a corollary about proper families over a curve, and a Bertini-type theorem for rational pair