1,720,966 research outputs found
The constitution of the non profit enterprise : ideals, conformism and reciprocity
Get PDFLiuc Papers n. 115, Serie Etica, Diritto ed Economia 8, novembre 2002. We provide an account of the non profit enterprise based on the motivations of the agents involved. Our main idea is that these are ex-post motivated by both self-interest and a conditional willingness to conform to their ex ante accepted constitutional ideology, which are weighed up in a comprehensive utility function. Ideology is shaped as the result of a hypothetical 'social' contract between the relevant figures participating in the venture, in particular an entrepreneur, a worker, and a consumer who acts as a dummy beneficiary in the ex-post stage. It can thus be defined as a normative principle of fairness that boils down to a distributive social welfare function defined over the outcomes of a game, which permits to order them according to their conformity to the constitutional ideology. For conformist preferences depend upon expectations of reciprocal conformity to a normative principle, defined on social states described in as much they conform to an ideal, then the agents' model of choice asks for the adoption of the psychological games approach, where payoff functions range over not only the players' strategies but also their beliefs. If the conformist prompt to action is sufficiently strong then the outcome in which both the active agents perform an action improving the quality of the good with respect to the free market standard, thus maximising the surplus of the consumers, results in a psychological Nash equilibrium of the game. We associate this outcome, and the corresponding norm of behaviour, with the constitution of the non profit enterprise. We also show that the structure of the interaction is a coordination game, thus calling for the necessity of devices such as codes of ethics to solve the coordination proble
Ideals, conformism and reciprocity: A model of Individual Choice with Conformist Motivations, and an Application to the Not-for-Profit Case
No full text
Varieties of capitalisms and varieties of performances: accounting for inequality in post-Soviet Union transition economies
No full textThe Constitution of the Not-For-Profit Organisation: Reciprocal Conformity to Morality
Get PDFWe investigate the link between individual motivations and economic organisations by focusing on the case of non-profit firms. First, we provide a model of individual behaviour that allows for agents to have motivations different from self-interest. We assume that individuals desire to comply with the prescriptions of a universally recognised moral principle conditionally on the expectation of similar compliance by other agents. This principle will shape the constitution of the non-profit organisation. Second, we study a simple ‘production game’ where a ‘for-profit’ and a ‘non-profit’ equilibria both exist. In the former, self-interested considerations prevail, so that agents implement the free-market standard; conversely, in the latter, conformist preferences are dominant, so that players act in such a way that the moral principle is fulfilled. The non-profit organisation is characterised in terms of a ‘social contract’ between the founders of the firm and its stakeholders. We also point out that the structure of the ‘psychological game’ underlying the interaction is akin to a co-ordination problem, so that the possibility of co-ordination failures underscores the risk of ‘distorting’ individual dispositions in the shift from the ‘micro’ level of the individuals to the ‘macro’ level of the organisation as a whole. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005Non-profit, non-self-interested motivations, conformism, reciprocity, ideology,
Trust and trustworthiness after a land restitution program: Lab-in-the-field evidence from Colombia
Get PDFWe assess the impact of a governmental program to compensate victims of forced displacement on pro-social behavior. All our subjects were eligible to apply for restitution of their land in accordance with the "Bill of Victims" (Ley de Víctimas, Bill 1448/2011). The key independent variable of our analysis is whether a subject had obtained land within this or similar programs. Our dependent variables are a subject's trust and trustworthiness to unknown others, as measured by a modified version of a Trust Game. We focus on interpersonal trust and trustworthiness because of their well-documented positive effect on economic development. Our design also included a treatment in which subjects voted on their most preferred outcomes in the Trust Game, because we wanted to understand whether forms of consultative democracy could engender higher mutual trust. We find that land restitution significantly increases trustworthiness, while there is no effect on trust. This is consistent with findings that trust and trustworthiness tap into different aspects of pro-sociality. Voting does not improve either trust or trustworthiness, but there is a positive effect once interacted with restitution
- …
