Implicit Agreements Research Articles

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

Analysis on Medical Negligence Under Consumer Protection Act 2019 and Indian Contract Act 1872

Medical negligence occurs when medical care providers fail to fulfil their professional obligations. All healthcare practitioners must provide a standard of care to their patients. It may be considered medical negligence if they don't fulfil that duty. When patients go to a doctor, they expect to receive medical care using all of the doctor's expertise to solve their medical issues. The arrangement retains the fundamental components of a tort while taking the form of a contract. A physician has obligations to his patients, and any carelessness on the part of the physician may give rise to legal action. Before performing diagnostic procedures or administering therapeutic care, the physician must get the patient's informed consent. The Consumer Protection Act of 1986 covers the services provided by doctors, and patients can file complaints with the Consumer Courts for resolution. Case laws are a valuable resource law for resolving different issues. Before the adoption of the Consumer Protection Act, claims of medical negligence were made under Contract law, and even today, damages can be made under civil law ; however, since implementing the Consumer Protection Act, the civil law remedy has become less critical. The doctor and the patient have a specific relationship, which can be oral, written, or implicit agreements agreed upon by the patient or his representatives and the doctor or hospital. Anyone who has suffered losses due to a doctor's negligence can register a complaint with the appropriate authority. Despite this, the council can sanction the doctor and revoke their registration for their careless actions, but it cannot compensate the victim of such misbehaviour. The Indian Medical Council has enforced stricter measures to raise the bar for medical ethics and practice standards for the past few years.

The Nexus Between Weak Social Contracts and Citizen Quiescence in Kenya

Plunder and mismanagement of public resources is an intractable problem that emasculates public sector service delivery in Kenya. It undermines efforts by the national and county governments to deliver public goods and services. Unfortunately, as the plunder of public resources happens driven by a predatory elite, the citizens tend to remain passive, disinterested, and quiescent in demanding public accountability from their leaders. A social contract exists between citizens and their rulers. Social contractarian theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Rawls, and John Locke construe social contracts as explicit or implicit agreements between the ruled and rulers, in which case, the governed cede some of their freedoms and liberties in exchange for protection and public goods by the rulers. Ostensibly, social contracts define the moral duties of citizens and the moral duties of rulers. However, a disequilibrium emerges when any party fails to fulfil its moral duties, causing the social contract to weaken. In retrospect, this study aimed to establish the nexus between citizen quiescence in holding leaders accountable and weak social contracts. The researchers conducted a mixed-method survey involving 100 respondents from Nairobi City County to determine the relationship between citizen quiescence and weak social contracts. The findings were R (98) = 0.764, p<0.05, R2 .579, indicating a positive correlation between weak social contracts and citizen quiescence (inaction) in demanding public accountability. Besides, the coefficient of determination R2 of 0.579 suggests that all factors held constant; weak social contracts could explain 57.9% of citizen quiescence or lethargy in Kenya at a 95% confidence level. Based on these results, it is plausible to conclude that there is a nexus between weak social contracts and citizen inaction (quiescence) in demanding public accountability. However, extensive research is necessary to establish other variables that could explain the variability using a large N sample.

How could we make a social robot? A virtual bargaining approach.

What is required to allow an artificial agent to engage in rich, human-like interactions with people? I argue that this will require capturing the process by which humans continually create and renegotiate 'bargains' with each other. These hidden negotiations will concern topics including who should do what in a particular interaction, which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, and the momentary conventions governing communication, including language. Such bargains are far too numerous, and social interactions too rapid, for negotiation tobe conducted explicitly. Moreover, the very process of communication presupposes innumerable momentary agreements concerning the meaning ofcommunicative signals, thus raising the threat of circularity. Thus, the improvised 'social contracts' that govern our interactions must be implicit. I draw on the recent theory of virtual bargaining, according to which social partners mentally simulate a process of negotiation, to outline how these implicit agreements can be made, and note that this viewpoint raises substantial theoretical and computational challenges. Nonetheless, I suggest that these challenges must be met if we are ever to create AI systems that can work collaboratively alongside people, rather than serving primarily as valuable special-purpose computational tools. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Cognitive artificial intelligence'.

Renegotiation of long‐term contracts as part of an implicit agreement

I study a repeated principal–agent game with long‐term output contracts that can be renegotiated at will. Actions are observable but not contractible, so they can only be incentivized through implicit agreements formed in equilibrium. I show that contract renegotiation is a powerful tool for incentive provision, despite the stationarity of the environment. Continuation contracts are designed to punish deviations in noncontractible behavior. If the equilibrium actions are observed, these contracts are renegotiated away. This form of anticipated renegotiation results in welfare improvements over outcomes attainable by one‐period contracts or by long‐term contracts that are not renegotiated. When the principal is not protected by limited liability, first‐best outcomes are attainable regardless of the impatience of the players. Equilibrium strategies are shown to satisfy various concepts of renegotiation‐proofness.

Public service bargains and non-partisan ministerial advisors: servants of two masters

To what extent can the public service bargain framework be applied to non-partisan ministerial advisors? Public service bargains are defined as ‘explicit or implicit agreements between public servants – the civil or uniformed services of the state – and those they serve’. The public service bargain framework has increasingly been used as an analytical tool with which to examine the elements of the bargain as experienced by various actors in different jurisdictions. The elements of the public service bargain framework are explored through the experiences of a distinct subgroup of non-partisan advisors – portfolio private secretaries – serving in the politicised environment of ministers’ offices. The minister’s office has been characterised as the ‘purple zone’ where politics (represented by the colour blue) and administration (represented by the colour red) converge to transform political will into administrative action. This qualitative research article: briefly reviews the public service bargain literature; describes the actors and setting; gives voice to their experience of the public service bargain; applies the public service bargain heuristic; and reveals new insights into how the public service bargain operates with dual principals. Points for practitioners The public service bargain framework allows for dual principal–single agent relationships within public administration settings. Applying the public service bargain heuristic to this group of non-partisan advisors: enables a view of how the public service bargain operates at different levels (macro, meso and micro); shows that the public service bargain for these advisors has changed over time in response to administrative reforms; and demonstrates that these advisors are professionally and personally affected through the misaligned expectations of dual principals.

Competition Laws, Norms and Corporate Social Responsibility

Theory offers differing perspectives and predictions about the impact of product market competition on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using firm-level data on CSR from 2002 through 2015 and panel data on competition laws in 48 countries, we discover that intensifying competition induces firms to increase CSR activities. Analyses indicate that (a) intensifying competition spurs firms to invest more in CSR as a strategy for strengthening relationships with workers, suppliers, and customers and (b) the competition-CSR effect is stronger in economies where social norms prioritize CSR-type activities, e.g., treating others fairly, satisfying implicit agreements, protecting the environment, etc. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

SHAPING LIVING IN SOLIDARITY AMONG OLDER VULNERABLE PEOPLE IN BRUSSELS

This research explores how older people construct their view on ‘living in solidarity’. The data was collected during a cohousing project (from construction till occupation). Co-creation sessions with residents and project coordinators were analyzed. 7 conditions and success factors were unraveled that deemed important to realize ‘solidary housing’: 1) The challenge to unite individual and collective needs; 2) Continuous task to engage (candidate-) residents, from early beginning; 3) A targeted selection of residents; 4) Maximizing the competences of older people, 5) Developing a group identity consciousness, 6) Involving experts providing support for group- and individual trajectories, 7) Creating a climate of confidence. Solidary housing appeared to be a nuanced and layered concept which should not be overidealized. Participants demonstrate what is realistic, and how it can be shaped in daily practice. By discussing and deciding on group issues, the project coordinators created a shared platform for implicit and explicit agreements.

Afecto patronal y autoridad en tres fábricas colombianas, 1880-1960

Con base en fuentes primarias y secundarias sobre tres importantes fábricas colombianas durante sus primeras décadas de desarrollo, el presente trabajo analiza las relaciones laborales e interacciones sociales entre patronos y trabajadores, en las que predominó un estilo paternalista de autoridad. Asimismo, explora un conjunto específico de nexos personalizados creados en torno a planes de bienestar y asistencia social, que cultivaron elementos emocionales y afectivos, afines a propósitos pragmáticos de control social e integración de los trabajadores a los nuevos roles productivos y exigencias de la naciente industrialización. Ante la debilidad y poca difusión de la normativa laboral y los mecanismos de negociación entre el capital y el trabajo, resultaron muy decisivos los acuerdos implícitos y reciprocidades de estas relaciones paternalistas en la construcción de culturas de trabajo y perdurables mecanismos de sometimiento distintivos de cada firma.

Renegotiation of Long-Term Contracts with Implicit Incentives

Long-term relationships are often governed by a combination of contracts and implicit agreements. I show that there are welfare gains to writing long-term contracts with the intention of rewriting their terms at a later stage, despite lack of change in the underlying environment. This form of renegotiation is perfectly anticipated as part of an implicit agreement. The benefits of renegotiation are demonstrated in a principal-agent model with observable but noncontractible effort where the players sign long-term output-contingent contracts. Continuation contracts form a basis for punishing deviations from the implicit agreement, but their terms are renegotiated away on the equilibrium path. In the baseline model continuation contracts are designed to lead to unbounded punishments to the principal who is not protected by limited liability. This facilitates the implementation of first best outcomes regardless of the patience of the players and the output technology. In contrast, the first best is not attainable in equilibria without on-path renegotiation when the players are impatient. When the principal is protected by limited liability, continuation contracts can hold either player down to their outside option in equilibrium.

Mutual Forbearance Breaking:Reactivating Competitive Attacks in Multimarket Competition

Research on multimarket competition has demonstrated that structural patterns of firms’ competitive interactions across markets provoke implicit agreements of collusion, and that firms build multim...

Relational Political Contribution under Common Agency

A model of political contribution of dynamic common agency where state-contingent agreements must be self-enforced is considered. Two issues are mainly examined; punishment strategy on deviation and the limit and scope of implicit agreements. The punishment strategy on the principals takes a form of two-phase scheme in general and, more specifically, it is either an “Exclusion-type”, on which the bad decision on the deviator is keep to be chosen over time, or a “Sanction-type” which is indeed same as the so-called stick-and-carrot strategy. Furthermore we characterize the payo set of the equilibria on which the same decision is chosen by the agent through implicit agreements and compare it with those in the standard static menu auction model. One of the main implications is that there could be an equilibrium outcome which cannot be supported on our model even the discount factor is close to one. Keyword: Common Agency, Relational Contract, Lobbying JEL classification: D86, C73, D72, L14

CENTRE: creating psychological safety ingroups.

Ten years of clinical and teaching experience has shown us that when teams or groups come together, it is often for a commonly understood and agreed upon purpose, but often without an agreed upon process of how to work together. Explicit guidelines in this regard promote psychological safety. This article presents a method of developing agreements that can be used in a variety of settings to create psychological safety and cohesion. In our experience, agreements about how people join together seem to be developed implicitly. Assumption-based and implicit agreements can engender friction because unspoken or unclear agreements are not easily addressed because they are not universally understood. A literature review helped to identify key factors contributing to psychological safety and led to creating 'CENTRE' to help clinical teams apply these factors. We are now starting to evaluate its impact. We believe a tool such as CENTRE facilitates the development of explicitly articulated group formation and maintenance guidelines, thus reducing the risk of interpersonal discord. We propose that a tool such as CENTRE be considered for a range of group situations, including clinical family meetings, teaching, professional teams and Balint-type groups. We are currently using this approach in clinical, academic and other professional environments. Findings from a survey of groups where CENTRE was used suggested that participants find the process useful. We believe a tool such as CENTRE can be used to help address relational issues, promote psychological safety, inclusion and trust among members, and reduce the risk of undeclared expectations and assumptions from dictating how groups function. Assumption-based and implicit agreements can engender friction because unspoken or unclear agreements are not easily addressed.

Special issue on agreement technologies

Most would agree that large-scale open distributed systems are an area of enormous social and economic potential. In fact, regardless of whether they are realised for the purpose of business or leisure, in a private or a public context, people’s transactions and interactions are increasingly mediated by computers. The resulting networks are usually large in scale, involving millions of interactions, and are open for the interacting entities to join or leave at will. We have been experiencing a paradigm shift in the way that such systems are built, enacted, and managed: away from rigid and centralised client–server architectures, towards more flexible and decentralised means of interaction. Nowadays, there is a growing awareness that the notion of agreement and agreement processes will be of key importance for the next generation of such decentralised large-scale open distributed systems (Ossowski et al. 2013). Until recently, the concept of agreement was a domain of study mainly for philosophers and sociologists and it was applied exclusively to human societies. In recent years, the growth of disciplines such as social psychology, socio-biology, social neuroscience, together with the spectacular emergence of the information society technologies, have changed this situation. Presently, agreement and all the processes and mechanisms related with reaching agreements between different kinds of agents are a subject of research and analysis also from technology-oriented perspectives. Casanovas (2013), for instance, tackles this matter from within the context of philosophy and sociology of law. A study from the perspective of cognitive science and technology is introduced by Paglieri (2013). In one or another way, the notion of agreement has always been relevant to the development software systems as well. Traditionally, it has been based on implicit agreements between programmers and language designers. Thanks to the formal semantics of programming languages specified by their designers, programmers are aware of the meaning of the computational concepts used to write and execute a program. For instance, programmers who use some imperative programming languages share the meaning of the concept of variable, value or loop as well as the notion of program state and state transition. As software systems become bigger and more complex, more dynamic and explicit agreements between project leaders and programmers are needed, in order to establish and document the relationships between the different software components. These agreements (e.g. in the form of specifications of interface and behaviour) become then the basis for the subsequent implementation and verification of the resulting software product. They are established dynamically at design-time, as project leaders and programmers need to interact and discuss the component specifications. However, once such agreements are reached for all elements of the software system, they necessarily remain unchanged at execution time. But, when * George Vouros georgev@unipi.gr

Performance Target Revisions in Incentive Contracts: Do Information and Trust Reduce Ratcheting and the Ratchet Effect?

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine a setting where principals use past performance to annually revise performance targets, but do not fully incorporate the past performance information in their target revisions. We argue that this situation is driven by some principals and agents having an implicit agreement where the principal “allows” the agent to receive economic rents from positive performance-target deviations that are the result of superior effort or transitory gains by not revising targets upward, while the agent “accepts” target revisions by not restricting output when these revisions are the result of structural changes in the operation's true economic capacity. Although both the principal and the agent can benefit from an implicit agreement, we argue that for the implicit agreement to be maintainable, the principal either needs information on the cause of the performance-target deviation or there needs to be trust between the principal and the agent. Using archival data across multiple years and independent bank units, we find a pattern of ratchet attenuation and output restriction that is consistent with the existence of implicit agreements for those principal-agent dyads where information asymmetry is sufficiently reduced or mutual trust exists. Data Availability: Data used in this study cannot be made public due to a confidentiality agreement with the participating firm.

Neither Nature nor Contract: Toward an Institutional Perspective on Parenthood Essay

Abstract The official narrative of parental laws in Israel describes biological parenthood as the natural legal basis for determining parenthood, while recognizing legal adoption and surrogacy, in specific circumstances, as the sole official exception to the rule (and even then with some remnants of the biological connection). However, closer examination of parental laws in Israel, as well as in other countries, reveals that biological parenthood has in fact never served as the sole basis for recognizing parental status. Familial status, explicit and implicit agreements, and functional parenthood have all served, and continue to serve in many cases, albeit not always officially, as key parameters in determining the parental relationship and its consequences. The objection against the exclusivity of natural, biological parenthood has seemingly been strengthened in light of the challenge facing lawmakers through technological reproduction advances such as sperm donations, egg donations, and surrogacy. As a result of these recent developments, prominent scholars have begun to seek alternative definitions for the biological definition. One such approach, which was influenced by cultural feminism, attempts to determine the identity of the parent based on a concrete psychological relationship between the parent and the child. Another, more radical approach, views individual autonomy and the voluntary contract as the new basis for legal parenthood. In this essay, I argue that both alternatives – natural-biological and voluntary contract – do not sufficiently narrate the story behind determination of parenthood in Israeli law nor do they supply a sound normative basis for proper regulation of parental determination. In addition, I argue that while these approaches, which focus on the concrete psychological relationship between parent and child, add an important element to the discussion of parental determination, they are too focused on the private aspects of specific parent–child relationships and in doing so, these approaches overlook important elements of the proper legal regulation of parenthood. In light of this insufficiency, I suggest a social-institutional perspective of parenthood, one emphasizing that parenthood is not merely a matter of nature, but instead an artificial construct structured and designed by society. In addition, this approach rejects the current dissonance that exists between (1) the legal determination of parenthood; (2) the regulation of reproductive technologies, on the one hand, and the regulation of parenthood’s content in the sense of regulating parental status vs. state and vs. children, on the other hand. This approach maintains that the legal and social definition of parenthood will inevitably affect the content of parenthood. Therefore, I argue that on a normative level, various decisions regarding regulation of reproductive technologies and the determination of parenthood must take into account not only the involved parties but also the manner the decision can affect the conception “who is a parent” and more importantly, the ethos of parenthood that the law should encourage.

The interaction of explicit and implicit contracts: A signaling approach

We analyze the interaction of explicit and implicit contracts in a model with selfish and fair principals. Fair principals are willing to honor implicit agreements, selfish principals are not. We investigate a separating equilibrium in which principals reveal their type through the contract offer to the agent. Explicit and implicit contracts are shown to be substitutes. Since the agent learns the principal's type, a selfish principal must rely on explicit incentives. A fair principal, by contrast, can effectively induce implicit incentives and does not need to use explicit incentives. We also find a strategic complementarity between explicit and implicit incentives.

Estructuras sociales y gobierno

Social structures are implicit agreements for the organization of society around the issues of social power: ideology, wealth, the military and the state. These structures develop in a natural way due to pressures of different kind: labor, environmental, demographic among others. In our model, the structure of the network, in particular its size, determine important features of the government. Particularly important in our approach is the Dunbar number D of the network, since the size of the network is bounded as n ≤ 40 (D/2) m-1 for an m-level government. We show that the size of the government is proportional to .

Training, Production, and Channel Separation in ITC's E‐Choupal Network

In recent years, I.T.C. Limited (hereafter ITC) developed the “e‐Choupals” for the rural areas of India. In this new business model, ITC reaches implicit agreements with some farmers (inside the network) that they can sell the products directly to ITC at the market price in the local market, but allow the farmers, both inside and outside the network, to access valuable information through the e‐Choupals. In this study, we investigate ITC's incentive of offering such opportunities, especially to those farmers outside the network, and analyze the farmers’ strategic quantity decisions. We show that the implicit agreement behaves as a formal contract, regardless of the price elasticity of the local market: Once reaching an agreement with ITC, the farmers always give priority to delivering directly to ITC. The e‐Choupal network leads naturally to the complete separation of selling channels, provided that ITC's capacity constraint is not tight. Surprisingly, in a variety of scenarios, ITC finds it optimal to provide the best available training to the farmers outside the network. We further show that our results are not prone to potential cheating in the mandi system, the possible exploitation via postponed payments, and the stochastic effects on the market‐clearing price.

Knowing your limits: Informal governance and judgment in the EU

The burgeoning literature on informal governance has shed new light on the workings of international organizations and the hidden rules of the game. The common thrust of these studies is that informal governance is the result of an implicit agreement among states that, in order to sustain cooperation, it can be necessary to accommodate important interests even if this seemingly goes against the organization’s purpose. Struck under conditions of uncertainty, however, implicit agreements such as this are necessarily vague, and their implementation is bound to generate conflicts that threaten to undermine the organization’s legitimacy. How, then, do states decide whether formal rules or informal governance apply? This article uses the case of the EU to propose a solution to this dilemma. The central argument is that member states have delegated the authority to adjudicate on demands for informal governance to the office of the Council Presidency. They mold the legislative agenda such that the government in office can be trusted in its judgment. The plausibility of this argument is illustrated with a description of the Presidency’s historical development and a case study on the negotiation of the EU’s controversial Working Time Directive. Apart from pointing to a missing piece in the literature on informal governance, the study holds more general lessons for the interaction of formal and informal rules as well as the information-providing role of international institutions.