Private Behavior Research Articles

Institutional Determinants of Private Shareholder Engagement in Brazil and South Africa: The Role of Regulation

AbstractManuscript typeEmpiricalResearch Question/IssueThis study investigates to what extent regulation encourages private shareholder engagement attitudes and behavior (including behind‐the‐scenes consultations, letters, meetings, and ongoing dialogues) of pension funds and asset managers with listed investee companies on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues in Brazil and South Africa.Research Findings/InsightsDrawing on 44 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with pension fund representatives, asset managers, and other investment players, the findings suggest that legislation provides limited direct encouragement to private engagement behavior. However, legislation encourages attitudes toward Responsible Investment by enhancing investor understanding of Responsible Investment, increasing the interest of pension funds and asset consultants in the Responsible Investment practices of asset managers, and reducing the fear of pension funds to violate their fiduciary duties, thereby promoting an enabling environment for ESG engagement.Theoretical/Academic ImplicationsThis article adds to the literature on comparative corporate governance and shareholder engagement. To the best of our knowledge, this is first study that specifically analyzes how regulation affects private shareholder engagement behavior in emerging markets, providing empirical support for the institutional perspective. The findings also suggest that the sophistication of the legislation on ESG issues in Brazil and South Africa is more typical of developed countries, indicating the need for a more fine‐grained analysis of emerging markets in corporate governance studies.Practitioner/Policy ImplicationsThis study draws investors' attention to the importance of understanding the national legal environment of the companies with which they engage and offers insights to governments interested in fostering ESG engagement practices.

Individual action, world society, and environmental change: 1993–2010

ABSTRACTThis article studies the question of how global cultural models shape individual environmental behaviours. The analysis applies a novel, cross-sectional, longitudinal, multilevel model that combines individual-level survey data from sixteen countries collected by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) with contextual characteristics such as the presence of international organisations, the national institutionalisation of environmentalism, and polities’ demands on individual participation. The analysis provides only limited support for the direct effects of ties to world society. It rather suggests indirect effects via the institutionalisation of environmentalism at the national level and via various individual exposure variables. In addition, both public and private behaviours are positively influenced by attitudinal alignment with global models, whereas certain individualisation processes have negative effects.

Exploring pro-environmental behaviors of consumers: An analysis of contextual factors, attitude, and behaviors

By including the context within which consumers' pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors are formed, this research provides a comprehensive delineation of the process that leads from context to behavior. This is the first study to examine context factors as subjective perceptions made by consumers about aspects of their own situation, specifically the extent to which they perceive having more or less time, money, and power available. In contrast to previous research considering one type of behavior (such as recycling), this study recognizes pro-environmental behavior as a heterogeneous, multi-dimensional construct, and includes both public and private sphere behaviors. Pro-environmental business managers and policy-makers may not be in a position to impact objective contextual factors that consumers face, however, they may influence perceptions and attitudes. This study identifies specifically which variables may be of more interest to modulate, so as to increase pro-environmental behavior.

'It is just the way it was in the past before I went to test': a qualitative study to explore responses to HIV prevention counselling in rural Tanzania.

BackgroundVoluntary counselling and testing (VCT) for HIV first evolved in Western settings, with one aim being to promote behaviours which lower the risk of onward transmission or acquisition of HIV. However, although quantitative studies have shown that the impact of VCT on sexual behaviour change has been limited in African settings, there is a lack of qualitative research exploring perceptions of HIV prevention counselling messages, particularly among clients testing HIV-negative. We conducted a qualitative study to explore healthcare worker, community and both HIV-negative and HIV-positive clients’ perceptions of HIV prevention counselling messages in rural Tanzania.MethodsThis study was carried out within the context of an ongoing community HIV cohort study in Kisesa, northwest Tanzania. Nine group sessions incorporating participatory learning and action (PLA) activities were conducted in order to gain general community perspectives of HIV testing and counselling (HTC) services. Thirty in-depth interviews (IDIs) with HIV-negative and HIV-positive service users explored individual perceptions of HIV prevention counselling messages, while five IDIs were carried out with nurses or counsellors offering HTC in order to explore provider perspectives.ResultsTwo key themes revolving around socio-cultural and contextual factors emerged in understanding responses to HIV prevention counselling messages. The first included constraints to client-counsellor interactions, which were impeded as a result of difficulties discussing private sexual behaviours during counselling sessions, a hierarchical relationship between healthcare providers and clients, insufficient levels of training and support for counsellors, and client concerns about confidentiality. The second theme related to imbalanced gender-power dynamics, which constrained the extent to which women felt able to control their HIV-related risk.ConclusionWithin the broader social context of a rural African setting, HIV prevention counselling based on a Western model of individual-level agency seems unlikely to make a significant contribution to sexual behaviour change until there is greater recognition by counsellors of the ways in which power dynamics within many relationships influence behaviour change. More culturally relevant counselling strategies and messages and infrastructural improvements such as additional training for counsellors and counselling rooms which ensure privacy and confidentiality, may lead to better outcomes in terms of sexual risk reduction.

Effect of Consumers’ Awareness in Store and Determinants of Consumer Complaint Behavior on Consumer Complaint Intention: Focus on Super Stores and Traditional Markets

Product complaints allow business operators to learn from and solve problems they have been unaware of and prevent customers from leaving in advance. The ability to deal properly with complaints may improve consumer loyalty and repurchase intentions. This study analyzes consumers` intention in complaining behavior towards supermarkets and traditional markets. This study provides implications for business operators in the establishment of marketing strategies to deal with complaints and perform education related to consumer complaints by the verification of variables that influence intention on complaining behavior. A survey was conducted on housewife consumers who had experience using supermarkets and traditional markets. The major results are as follows: first, in store awareness higher in supermarkets than in traditional markets. Second, determinants of consumer complaint behavior, indicated a belief there was a need to spend more money at traditional markets than supermarkets, where the possibility of complaint success and complaint attitudes were found to be low. Third, intention of complaining behavior was lower at traditional markets than supermarkets. Intentions on private complaining behavior and public complaining behavior were both low. Fourth, intention of private behavior is higher than intention of public behavior for both supermarkets and traditional markets. Fifth, complaint attitudes were variables with the greatest influence on intention of complaining behavior for both supermarkets and traditional markets.

Shadow Patent Systems: Technology, Economics, and Geopolitics

Patents are territorial instruments of exclusion structurally analogous to a protectionist trade barrier -- not affirmative rights or knowledge that can be treated as simple economic inputs. Digital technology has posed problems because of the vast number of patents, their presence in global standards, their indeterminate aspects, and the cost of disputes. While these problems are acknowledged, they are obscured by the lack of data on business practices and the confidentiality agreements that hide licensing transactions. Patents are published, but the use of patents remains secret, and the secondary markets that provide fuel for speculators and assertion specialists remain dark. At the same time, high-profile litigation in the smartphone wars has focused attention on international differences in the political economy of patent practice.Although different patent systems have their own issues, the impact of digital patents is felt in other domains. For example, by contractually committing standards participants to licensing their patents on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms, standards development organizations have opened patent practice to a new forms of economic scrutiny. While TRIPS sets out minimum standards for individual patents, it does not address limits on private behavior, state investment in patents, or how “applicant-friendly” a national patent regime may be. Beyond TRIPS and certain bilateral/plurilateral agreements, states are free to design patent systems that favor national champions, regulatory incumbents, giant aggregators, or institutions that discriminate de facto against imports or foreign litigants. Neighboring domains such as innovation policy, competition policy, and sovereign investment lack institutional frameworks for harmonization, and the discussion venues that exist are expected to remain inside their silos. Instead, patent policy has devolved into assorted ad hoc policies and strategies guided by anecdotal evidence and appeals to competitiveness and national advantage.

同居時に居住者が感じる「領域」の認識

It was found by analyses as below how occupants feel disharmony when they live together: 1. Occupants sometimes feel disharmony in daily life, and it happens when occupant's private area and behavior area are overlapped with family areas and their behavior areas; 2. To understand the reason that occupant feels disharmony in the house when living together, occupant's private area and behavior area was analyzed. As the consequence, it turned out that occupant's behavior area was smaller than his/her private area overall; and, 3. According to the analysis of relationship between the occupant's private area and behavior area, and family relationship, three types of family relationships were found: 1) the type of invasion of mother's area, 2) the type of balanced invasion of areas, and 3) the type of free invasion of areas.

Evolutionary Game Analysis of the Supervision Behavior for Public-Private Partnership Projects with Public Participation

The public can directly or indirectly participate in the PPP (public-private partnership) projects and then has an impact on the project profit and public or private behavior. To explore the influence of the public participation of the PPP projects supervision behavior, this paper analyzes the mutual evolutionary regularity of the private sector and government supervision department and the influence of public participation level on public and private behavior based on evolutionary game theory. The results show that the supervision strategy is not chosen when the supervision cost of government supervision department is greater than the supervision benefit; it can make private sector consciously provide the high-quality public products/services with the improvement of public participation level. Therefore, the government should reduce the cost of public participation and improve the public participation level and influence through the application of the Internet, big data, and other advanced technologies, in order to restrain the behavior of the private sector and improve the supervision efficiency.

Health worker posting and transfer at primary level in Tamil Nadu: Governance of a complex health system function.

Background:Posting and transfer (PT) of health personnel – placing the right health workers in the right place at the right time – is a core function of any large-scale health service. In the context of government health services, this may be seen as a simple process of bureaucratic governance and implementation of the rule of law. However the literature from India and comparable low and middle-income country health systems suggests that in reality PT is a contested domain, driven by varied expressions of private and public interest throughout the chain of implementation.Objective:To investigate policymaking for PT in the government health sector and implementation of policies as experienced by different health system actors and stakeholders at primary health care level.Methodology:We undertook an empirical case study of a PT reform policy at primary health care level in Tamil Nadu State, to understand how different groups of health systems actors experience PT. In-depth qualitative methods were undertaken to study processes of implementation of PT policies enacted through ‘counselling’ of health workers (individualized consultations to determine postings and transfers).Results:PT emerges as a complex phenomenon, shaped partially by the laws of the state and partially as a parallel system of norms and incentives requiring consideration and coordination of the interests of different groups. Micro-practices of governance represent homegrown coping mechanisms of health administrators that reconcile public and private interests and sustain basic health system functions. Beyond a functional perspective of PT, it also reflects justice and fairness as it plays out in the health system. It signifies how well a system treats its employees, and by inference, is an index of the overall health of the system.Conclusions:For a complex governance function such as PT, the roles of private actors and private interests are not easily separable from the public, but rather are intertwined within the complexities of delivery of a public service. This complexity blurs conventional boundaries of private and public ownership and behaviour, and raises critical questions for the interpretation of coordinated governance. Hence, the imperative of enforcing rules may need to be complemented with bottom-up policy approaches, including treating PT not merely as system dysfunction, but also as a potential instrument of governance innovations, procedural justice and the accountability of health services to communities they seek to serve.

Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis and the Greek debt crisis

This article attempts to analyze the current debt crisis in Greece based on the financial instability hypothesis developed by Hyman Minsky. This article shows that the hypothesis provides an understanding of how an economy endogenously becomes “financially fragile” and thus prone to crises. The authors analyze how public and private sector behavior in the Greek economy led to the country's debt crisis. In particular, based on a sample of 36 Greek companies, the authors show that between 2001 and 2014, the majority of those companies had switched to fragile financial structures. Special attention is devoted to the negative consequences of applying the neoclassical doctrine of “austerity measures” in Greece as the principal “anti-crisis” concept of mainstream economic science.

The determinants of Vietnamese banks’ lending behavior

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to theoretically and empirically examine the lending behavior of Vietnamese banks.Design/methodology/approach– A firm-banking model was established, considering risk-taking behavior and the regulatory environment. Based on the theoretical model, a simultaneous equation system was specified that considered loan growth and deposit growth as endogenous variables to empirically investigate lending behavior in Vietnam’s banking sector. Two-stage least square estimators were employed using a micro-level panel data set comprising 39 Vietnamese commercial banks.Findings– The empirical results demonstrate the divergence in the lending behavior of private and state-owned banks. The regressions results support the predictions of the theoretical model on the positive effect of economic growth and the negative effect of the government bond rate on bank lending. The results also suggest that deposit growth and liquidity constraint significantly influence loan supply in private banks, while equity growth is the determinant of lending behavior in state-owned banks. Nevertheless, the banks’ non-performing loan rate, which proxies for the expected default probability of loans, is found to not significantly affect loan supply.Research limitations/implications– Despite the efforts to capture the idiosyncratic characteristics of the Vietnamese banking system, this study does not fully take into account distinctive nature of the Vietnamese banking system.Practical implications– The paper suggests implications for the government monetary policy.Originality/value– The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it introduces a firm-banking theoretical model that allows banks offering different lending rates and modeled under different aspects of modern banking such as risk-taking behavior and regulatory environment. Second, it is a very first study empirically investigating the lending behavior of Vietnamese banks.

The Scope of the Global Institutional Order: Can Pogge Survive Cohen’s Critique of Rawls?

In this paper, I develop a critique of Thomas Pogge”s attempt in Realizing Rawls to expand the scope of the Original Position. I argue that Pogge is guilty of assuming the same arbitrary boundary between public and private behaviours made by Rawls. To actualize this critique, I take G. A. Cohen’s critique of John Rawls, found in its fullest form in Rescuing Justice and Equality, alongside Thomas Pogge”s attempt, in Realizing Rawls, to expand the scope of the Original Position. Cohen argues that the boundary Rawls wishes to draw between the public and private cannot be coherently maintained in the application of the Difference Principle. I argue that if this claim is true, then Pogge”s attempt to expand the scope of Rawls” Theory of Justice to the international arena is actually considerably more radical than Pogge intended. Not only do we need to worry about the justice of institutions in international law, but we now need to worry about the justice of individual actions inside a system of global justice. I conclude by considering some objections against Cohen”s, and thus, my position.

Does access to free health insurance crowd-out private transfers? Evidence from Mexico’s Seguro Popular

This study examines whether Seguro Popular, a free-of-charge publicly provided health insurance program for otherwise uninsured households, crowded-out private transfers in Mexico. Using data from the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey, the effects of Seguro Popular are identified using the spatial variation in the program’s coverage induced by its sequential roll-out throughout Mexico. The results show that Seguro Popular reduced on average a household’s probability of receiving private transfers by 5.55 % points. This finding appears to be driven by domestic private transfers, since the program’s effects are only statistically significant for private transfers originating within Mexico. In addition, Seguro Popular had a weak and not statistically significant negative effect on the amount of private transfers received. Failure to take into account possible changes in private behaviour induced by Seguro Popular may overstate the program’s potential benefits or distributional impacts.

Aplicación de un instrumento de medición de las motivaciones del ecologismo empresarial desde la perspectiva de los colaboradores no gerenciales

Este artículo presenta los resultados de la aplicación de un cuestionario validado estadísticamente que mide un aspecto de las competencias del personal no gerencial: su nivel de conocimiento sobre las razones del enverdecimiento organizacional. La muestra se compone de 576 trabajadores. La información que arroja el instrumento puede ser utilizada para desarrollar planes participativos enfocados en corregir las percepciones de los colaboradores sobre los motivos citados, ampliar sus competencias e incrementar sus conductas verdes. Se sugiere como razón del ecologismo empresarial al conocimiento que posee el empleado sobre conductas proambientales privadas.

Constructing Food Citizenship: Theoretical Premises and Social Practices

The reflection on food citizenship becomes pertinent if we take into account the importance of food and nourishment as constituting that which is social, its economic relevance, its globalized character, the fact that it is a highly regulated sector, and the important risks related to food. This context justifies, as well as conditions, the possibilities and difficulties of the emergence of a food citizenship. The framework establishes the expressive dimensions and the spheres of praxis of food citizenship and of the construction of the policies that facilitate the emergence and consolidation of this new space in which to exercise citizenship. In this paper, we will propose a concept of food citizenship based on the general concept of citizenship and of its connection to other similar concepts from which it must be differentiated and with which it must be related. This concept is based on the acknowledgement of rights –to food and to information about food- and of obligations, in private and public behavior, in political participation, in justice, and in cosmopolitanism.

Who's Afraid of WikiLeaks? Missed Opportunities in Political Science Research

AbstractLeaked information, such as WikiLeaks’ Cablegate, constitutes a unique and valuable data source for researchers interested in a wide variety of policy‐oriented topics. Yet political scientists have avoided using leaked information in their research. This article argues that we can and should use leaked information as a data source in scholarly research. First, the methodological, ethical, and legal challenges related to the use of leaked information in research have been considered, concluding that none of these present serious obstacles. Second, how political scientists can use leaked information to generate novel and unique insights concerning political phenomena using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods have been shown. Specifically, how leaked documents reveal important details concerning the Trans‐Pacific Partnership negotiations, and how leaked diplomatic cables highlight a significant disparity between the U.S. government's public attitude toward traditional knowledge and its private behavior have been demonstrated.

Does the expansion of Chinese state-owned enterprises affect the innovative behavior of private enterprises?

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) have expanded rapidly in China since 2003. Through an empirical study using Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database and Patent Application Database from 2004 to 2007, we found that the expansion of SOEs negatively affected the innovation of private enterprises. Chinese private enterprises usually do not have extensive assets or strong ability to obtain debt financing, and thus are less likely to maintain investments in R&D when SOEs expand. Considering private enterprises are the main contributors of innovation in China, it is important to note the negative effect of the expansion of SOEs on the innovation of private enterprises. We further distinguished the SOEs along two dimensions: holding type and affiliation type. Based on the first dimension, we divided the SOEs into absolutely controlled SOEs and relatively controlled SOEs (RSOEs); based on the second dimension, we divided the SOEs into those belonging to higher level governments (central or provincial) (HSOEs) and those belonging to lower level governments such as municipal governments (LSOEs). We found that only RSOEs and LSOEs expanded rapidly from 2004 to 2007, and that it is the expansion of RSOEs and LSOEs that led to a decrease in innovation of private enterprises. Moreover, we found that the expansion of SOEs increased the average interest rate faced by private enterprises and that the increase in average interest rate was the primary reason for the decrease in innovation of private enterprises.

When Private Life Became Political: German Politicians, Sex Scandals, and Mass Media, 1880–1914

In contrast to the United States or Great Britain, Germany is known as a country in which private and sexual behaviour of politicians was and is seldom published. This article, which is based on broad research of newspaper and archival sources, shows how the rise of the mass press since the 1880s led to an increase in sex scandals in imperial Germany, too, although censorship and the control of the press were still quite strict. Such reports about private matters provoked intense debates in different public spheres — such as parliaments, pubs, and courtrooms. Scandals about adultery, homosexuality, and sexual relations with women in colonies in Africa called public norms into questions. This way, media created a new kind of public knowledge about sexuality. The process by which political and public spheres changed is clearly linked to press campaigns. While private questions became more political, politicians presented themselves in a more private context in order to win back trust. However, many scandals were not initiated by tabloids but by political papers or by leading politicians themselves. Therefore, this article points out a change in the political communication due to the rise of the mass press and the increased political competition. In many cases, especially concerning adultery, the reactions were surprisingly tolerant and at least liberal and social democratic papers partly accepted homosexual conduct, while forced relations with African women were no longer tolerated. At the same time, these campaigns succeeded in attacking the conservative elite’s reputation and politics — such as those of the Emperor and his aristocratic advisors as well as of famous colonialists and leading politicians.

ARE THOUGHTS PRIVATE?

Based on the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, behavior analysts largely assume a dichotomy between public and private behavior. Thoughts, for example, are assumed to be something that occurs within the skin of the individual. This paper presents an interbehavioral alternative to this dichotomy. We conclude that thoughts are not private, but, instead, like all behavior, consist of interactions taking place in the only place they could - the public domain, the natural world. Implications of adopting this analysis for the science of behavior are considered.

PS directory: a scalable multilevel directory cache for CMPs

As the number of cores increases in current and future chip-multiprocessor (CMP) generations, coherence protocols must rely on novel hardware structures to scale in terms of performance, power, and area. Systems that use directory information for coherence purposes are currently the most scalable alternative. This paper studies the important differences between the directory behavior of private and shared blocks, which claim for a separate management of both types of blocks at the directory. We propose the PS directory, a two-level directory cache that keeps the reduced number of frequently accessed shared entries in a small and fast first-level cache, namely Shared cache, and uses a larger and slower second-level Private cache to track the large amount of private blocks. Entries in the Private cache do not implement the sharer vector, which allows important silicon area savings. Speed and area reasons suggest the use of eDRAM technology, much denser but slower than SRAM technology, for the Private cache, which in turn brings energy savings. Experimental results for a 16-core CMP show that, compared to a conventional directory, the PS directory improves performance by 14 \(\%\) while reducing silicon area and energy consumption by 34 and 27 \(\%\), respectively. Also, compared to the state-of-the-art Multi-Grain Directory, the PS directory apart from increasing performance, it reduces power by 18.7 \(\%\), and provides more scalability in terms of area.