Past Misbehavior Research Articles

Reverse contagion: role of empathy, narrative appeal, and intensity of previous misbehavior

PurposeThis study aims to explore consumer motivations to mitigate the contagion effect in access-based consumption after instances of prior customer misbehavior. Reverse contagion, demonstrated through customer citizenship behavior, entails using both firm-provided and personal resources to cocreate value, even in the presence of norm violations by others. The research delves into the influence of empathy, narrative appeal and past misbehavior severity on customer behavior, specifically in the context of reverse contagion.Design/methodology/approachTwo scenario-based studies and a field study were used within the context of scooter-sharing to assess the conceptual model. Study 1 (n = 156) and Study 2 (n = 97) were conducted through surveys. Study 3 (n = 54) was a field study.FindingsThe results emphasize the crucial role of empathy in breaking the cycle of misbehavior contagion. Specifically, the findings suggest that narrative appeals have the potential foster greater empathy, encouraging customers to counteract the contagion. However, the intensity of prior misbehavior lessens the efficacy of narrative appeals in triggering reverse contagion, thereby moderating the mediating effect of empathy.Originality/valueThis study investigates reverse contagion stemming from customer misbehavior in accessed-based consumption. It delves into the impact of empathy, narrative appeal and previous misbehavior on the dynamics of value codestruction and cocreation. This comprehensive examination of these factors within a unified framework represents a new contribution to the literature. The results illuminate this intricate phenomenon, offering valuable insights for managers to address adverse customer behavior and harness the positive aspects of reverse contagion.

The Effect of Supervisors on Employee Misconduct

ABSTRACT We study the influence of supervisors on employee misconduct at branches of U.S. financial institutions. Individual supervisor fixed effects explain twice as much variation in branch misconduct as firm fixed effects. Supervisor influence is concentrated in firms that theory suggests are most likely to delegate authority—firms with complex operations, distant branches, and trustworthy supervisors. Supervisors affect misconduct through their personnel decisions, attention to employees with past misbehavior, and ethics and industry rules training. After major internal control improvements, supervisor influence declines. Our results illustrate how supervisors influence misconduct above and beyond firm-level factors. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: D21; D82; G20, L22; L23; M12; M40.

Politics by denunciation: Political whistleblowing against members of parliament in Italy

Judicial investigations into politicians are a fundamental component of politics, with these investigations often leading to public scandals. Yet, empirical evidence of the strategic determinants of judicial investigations is intrinsically hard to gather, a problem that has significantly limited the study of this important phenomenon. This paper studies the politics behind judicial investigations by leveraging new data on prosecutors’ informants in 1125 episodes of misbehavior of Italian MPs involved in different crimes (1983–2019). Results provide evidence in favor of a political use of denunciations for corruption crimes: when a party weakens, the likelihood that political enemies denounce past misbehavior of members of the weakened party increases, suggesting that the political use of denunciation is elastic to changes in the electoral performance. Furthermore, weakened MPs are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the argument that accusations are politically motivated.

Is Police Misconduct Contagious? Non-trivial Null Findings from Dallas, Texas

ObjectivesUnderstanding if police malfeasance might be “contagious” is vital to identifying efficacious paths to police reform. Accordingly, we investigate whether an officer’s propensity to engage in misconduct is associated with her direct, routine interaction with colleagues who have themselves engaged in misbehavior in the past.MethodsRecognizing the importance of analyzing the actual social networks spanning a police force, we use data on collaborative responses to 1,165,136 “911” calls for service by 3475 Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers across 2013 and 2014 to construct daily networks of front-line interaction. And we relate these cooperative networks to reported and formally sanctioned misconduct on the part of the DPD officers during the same time period using repeated-events survival models.ResultsEstimates indicate that the risk of a DPD officer engaging in misconduct is not associated with the disciplined misbehavior of her ad hoc, on-the-scene partners. Rather, a greater risk of misconduct is associated with past misbehavior, officer-specific proneness, the neighborhood context of patrol, and, in some cases, officer race, while departmental tenure is a mitigating factor.ConclusionsOur observational findings—based on data from one large police department in the United States—ultimately suggest that actor-based and ecological explanations of police deviance should not be summarily dismissed in favor of accounts emphasizing negative socialization, where our study design also raises the possibility that results are partly driven by unobserved trait-based variation in the situations that officers find themselves in. All in all, interventions focused on individual officers, including the termination of deviant police, may be fruitful for curtailing police misconduct—where early interventions focused on new offenders may be key to avoiding the escalation of deviance.

Politics by Denunciation

Judicial investigations of politicians are a fundamental component of politics, often leading to scandals. Yet, empirical evidence of the strategic determinants of judicial investigations is intrinsically hard to gather, a problem that has significantly limited the study of this important phenomenon. This paper studies the politics behind judicial investigations leveraging new data on prosecutors' informants in 1125 episodes of misbehavior of Italian MPs involved in different crimes (1983-2019). Results provide evidence in favor of a political use of denunciations for corruption crimes: when a party weakens, the likelihood that political enemies denounce past misbehavior of members of the weakened party increases, suggesting that the political use of denunciation is elastic to changes in the electoral performance. The timing of past misbehavior is crucial: members of weakened parties are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the conjecture that accusations are politically motivated.

ETAS: An Efficient Trust Assessment Scheme for BANs

A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a wireless network of wearable computing devices and intelligent physiological sensors. The intelligent physiological sensors collect and process sensitive data from the patient body. The security, reliability, and trustworthiness of sensitive data collected and processed by intelligent physiological sensors are critical due to its unique application domain. Moreover, consistent and reliable data gathering along with its transmission also plays a vital role in WBANs. Trust management (in BANs) has been found as a useful tool to improve cooperation among sensor nodes, security as well as reliability. The paper recommends a novel and efficient, lightweight trust assessment scheme (ETAS) suitable for health application domains and does not rely purely on any encryption technique. The primary purpose is to develop an exciting comprehensive, novel trust estimation framework for BANs to enhance reliability, dependability, security by isolating compromised (hotspot) nodes with great resource efficiency. ETAS incorporates several exclusive (unique) features like efficient trust evaluator, secure and attack resistant, along with competent trust aggregator function to achieve comprehensive trust score. The trust evaluator function is a multi-trust (communication trust, data trust, and energy trust) strategy to deal with severe internal security threats such as badmouthing attack, ballot-stuffing attack, sybil attack, traitor attack, etc. with less resource consumption. Moreover, ETAS incorporates both the success rate and misbehavior component during trust evaluation. The success rate record the number of successful/unsuccessful interactions among sensor nodes in terms of packet send/receive. The misbehavior component keeps records of current and past misbehavior of sensor nodes for effective decision making. Moreover, ETAS focus on the frequency of interaction among biomedical sensor nodes within a specified period to analyze their behavior for efficient trust decisions. Furthermore, ETAS incorporates temperature, data trust as well as the trust score of biomedical sensors to identify hotspot nodes in BSN. ETAS offers full flexibility to adjust the trust threshold, trust domain, reward, and punishment term according to system and application requirements. ETAS's efficiency is validated through several outcomes (MATLAB R2019a) along with theoretical analysis in terms of energy consumption, attack detection, mitigation, trust computation cost, and packet delivery ratio.

Political Scandal: A Theory

AbstractWe study a model that characterizes the conditions under which past misbehavior becomes the subject of present scandal, with consequences for both the implicated politician and the parties that work with him. In the model, both authentic and fake scandals arise endogenously within a political framework involving two parties that trade off benefits of continued collaboration with a suspect politician against the possibility of reputational fallout. Rising polarization between the two parties, we show, increases the likelihood of scandal while decreasing its informational value. Scandals that are triggered by only the opposing party, we also find, are reputationally damaging to both parties and, in some instances, reputationally enhancing to the politician. The model also reveals that jurisdictions with lots of scandals are not necessarily beset by more misbehavior. Under well‐defined conditions, in fact, scandals can be a sign of political piety.

Supervisor Informal Authority and Employee Financial Misconduct

We study the influence of supervisors on financial misconduct at branches of broker-dealer firms. Individual supervisor fixed effects explain twice as much variation in branch misconduct as firm fixed effects. We find similar evidence when we study supervisors switching firms following mergers or branch closures that are unrelated to misconduct, indicating our results are not spuriously generated by endogenous mobility bias. Supervisors affect misconduct through their personnel decisions, attention to employees with past misbehavior, and industry rules and ethics training. Our paper is the first to explore the supervisor’s role, distinct from firm-level factors, in influencing financial misconduct.

Political Scandal: A Theory

We study a model that characterizes the conditions under which past misbehavior becomes the subject of present scandal, with consequences for both the implicated politician and the parties that work with him. In the model, both authentic and fake scandals arise endogenously within a political framework involving two parties that trade off benefits of continued collaboration with a suspect politician against the possibility of reputational fallout. Rising polarization between the two parties, we show, increases the likelihood of scandal while decreasing its informational value. Scandals that are triggered by only the opposing party, we also find, are reputationally damaging to both parties and, in some instances, reputationally enhancing to the politician. The model also reveals that jurisdictions with lots of scandals are not necessarily beset by more misbehavior. Under well-defined conditions, in fact, scandals can be a sign of political piety.

Children’s rationality, risk attitudes and field behavior

We investigate the relationship between risk attitudes, choice consistency and field behavior of children by conducting economic experiments with 1275 8th graders. Choices are not completely consistent with any of the economic theories we consider, however, they are not random either. We use our experimental data to structurally estimate risk preferences and correct for decision error. Using a measure constructed from the estimates and individual choices, we find that risk preferences do predict future field behavior. Children who are more risk averse are less likely to receive disciplinary referrals one and two years after the experiment and are more likely to complete high school, even controlling for economic rationality, family background, scholarly achievement and past misbehavior. Accounting for decision error turns out to be important as a simple aggregate measure of risk is not found to be correlated with field behavior.

Fighting the Past: Perceptions of Control, Historical Misperceptions, and Corrective Information in the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict

What makes people deny wrongdoing that their group has inflicted on others? Prior research argues that refusing to acknowledge past misbehavior contributes to intergroup conflict, making historical misinformation important to understand and address. In particular, feeling a lack of control may make people more vulnerable to these misperceptions—a claim we test in a preregistered survey experiment examining beliefs about the Palestinian exodus during the creation of the state of Israel. Consistent with expectations, Jewish Israelis who were asked to recall an event in which they lacked control were more vulnerable to arguments (incorrectly) denying any Jewish responsibility for the exodus. By contrast, corrective information successfully reduced misperceptions regardless of feelings of control. However, corrections had no effect on attitudes toward the outgroup or support for the peace process, which suggests that historical misperceptions may be more of a symptom of intergroup conflict than a cause of its persistence.

ANALISIS PENGARUH PERILAKU KONSUMEN TERHADAP CUSTOMER MISBEHAVIOR DALAM INDUSTRI RETAIL DI INDONESIA (Studi pada Hypermart)

The retail industry is one of the fastest growing industries in Indonesia, with Hypermart as one of the largest retail companies. As a company engaged in retail then Hypermart provides a variety of consumer goods that the majority of Indonesian people shopping with high frequency at Hypermart. The purpose of this study was to understand the effect of customer behavior in the past and the future customer behavior. In previous studies in various research on consumer behavior, this relationship has not been studied adequately using personality variables were complete. Additional variables used in this study are five variables based on consumer personality is Consumer alienation, Machiavellianism, Sensation seeking, aggressiveness, self-esteem, Past misbehavior, Future misbehavior Furthermore, this study also aimed as a consideration for the managerial or practitioners Hypermart in the decision-making process, in an effort to reduce misbehavior future intentions of customers Hypermart through past efforts to reduce customer misbehavior. The sampling method used in the study to be performed are non-probability sampling. This study used a questionnaire as a major tool in data collection. This research will be used purposive sampling technique. The number of samples in this research are 300 respondents were evaluated, and the data were analyzed using multiple regression with SPSS 16. The results of this study can be used by companies that are facing the problem of customer misbehavior in shaping strategies to reduce customer misbehavior.

TMS‐HCW: a trust management system in hierarchical clustered wireless sensor networks

AbstractHierarchical clustered wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of many tiny sensor nodes, cluster heads, and the Sink. Problems like insecure operational environments, nodes' misbehavior, and improper selection of peer nodes lead to significantly degrade the overall performance of WSNs and their vulnerability to many attacks. In another direction, WSNs often have vital and crisis duties, and most of the traditional security mechanisms are unsuitable for them. So, security is a vital and complex requirement for WSNs to improve their performance. One significant security solution is trust management system (TMS). TMS enhances the security by verifying the untrustworthy nodes; it also improves the cooperation among nodes and increases the network performance. But, TMS is a highly challenging issue in WSNs because of high overhead and computational complexity, limited resources, nodes' high density, dynamic topology, and nodes' mobility. As a result, this paper proposes a highly scalable TMS for hierarchical clustered WSNs, called TMS‐HCW. In TMS‐HCW, each cluster head calculates the trustworthiness of its cluster's members, verifies the untrustworthy members, and removes them from the WSN's processes. TMS‐HCW is different from other existing TMSs in terms of trustworthiness calculation criteria, trustworthiness calculation procedure, and trustworthiness forecasting capability. TMS‐HCW combines the past misbehavior with the current status in a comprehensive way to obtain the robust trust values; it also uses the statistical quantitative methods with high accuracy in the trustworthiness forecasting process. The performance of TMS‐HCW is compared with the performance of Group‐based trust management scheme for clustered wireless sensor networks (GTMS) and PowerTrust TMSs; simulation results and theoretical statistical analyses indicate that TMS‐HCW is improved in terms of energy consumption, accuracy, traffic overhead, and scalability and fault tolerance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Trust, trustworthiness and the consensus effect: An evolutionary approach

People often form expectations about others using the lens of their own attitudes (the so-called consensus effect). We study the implications of this for trust and trustworthiness in an evolutionary model where social preferences are endogenous. Trustworthy individuals are more “optimistic” than opportunists and are accordingly less afraid to engage in market-based exchanges, where they may be vulnerable to cheating. Depending on the distribution of social preferences in the population, the material benefits from greater participation may compensate for the costs of being trustworthy. By providing an explicit account of how individuals form and revise their beliefs, we are able to show the existence of a polymorphic equilibrium where both trustworthiness and opportunism coexist in the population. We also analyze the effect of enforcement, distinguishing between its role as deterrence of future misbehavior and as retribution for past misbehavior. We show that enforcement aimed at deterring opportunistic behavior has ambiguous effects on social preferences. It may favor the spreading of trustworthiness (crowding in), but the opposite (crowding out) may also occur. By contrast, crowding out never occur when punishment is merely intended as retribution.

Anxiety or Rule Against Perpetuities?: Mental Health Inquiries in Bar Admission Post-Louisiana

Despite years of litigation on whether mental health inquiries in bar admission are discriminatory and violate the ADA, courts and state bars still disagree over them. A recent settlement between the DOJ and the Louisiana Supreme Court removing these inquiries from Louisiana’s bar application has some proclaiming mental health questions are now definitively illegal. Since Louisiana had copied a standard form used by twenty-five states, the agreement could have had far-reaching consequences.However, the DOJ’s findings that invalidated mental health inquiries ignored twenty years of established federal and state case law supporting narrowly tailored questions into serious mental illnesses. Moreover, the settlement lacks legal precedential effect, and in practical terms will not influence other states to settle given the weaknesses of the DOJ’s ADA enforcement scheme in the bar admittance context. Thus, in the likely case this issue is litigated again, the settlement is unlikely to have much influence.While the DOJ’s arguments were weak, changes to mental health questioning are still necessary as a matter of policy. In contrast to scholarship calling for a unilateral ban on such inquiries, I advocate for questions into mental illnesses that may excuse prior misconduct or current ailments affecting the ability to practice law. Also, bars must clarify how they use such mental health information, particularly that treatment will only serve as a mitigating factor to excuse past misbehavior or present illnesses. Finally, although narrow inquiries into serious mental diseases are permissible, they should be removed to encourage treatment for all disorders.

A Secure Trust Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Trust establishment is an important tool to improve cooperation and enhance security in wireless sensor networks. The core of trust establishment is trust estimation. If a trust estimation method is not robust against attack and misbehavior, the trust values produced will be meaningless, and system performance will be degraded. We present a novel trust estimation method that is robust against on-off attacks and persistent malicious behavior. Moreover, in order to aggregate recommendations securely, we propose using a modified one-step M-estimator scheme. The novelty of the proposed scheme arises from combining past misbehavior with current status in a comprehensive way. Specifically, we introduce an aggregated misbehavior component in trust estimation, which assists in detecting an on-off attack and persistent malicious behavior. In order to determine the current status of the node, we employ previous trust values and current measured misbehavior components. These components are combined to obtain a robust trust value. Theoretical analyses and evaluation results show that our scheme performs better than other trust schemes in terms of detecting an on-off attack and persistent misbehavior.

Customers acting badly: Evidence from the hospitality industry

The activities of misbehaving customers represent a significant problem for organizations across diverse sectors and industries. Customer misbehavior signifies behavior within the exchange setting that deliberately violates the generally accepted norms of conduct in such situations. The core aim of this study is to advance understanding of the antecedents to past customer misbehavior and examine the relationship between past misbehavior and future misbehavior intentions. Although prior studies offer insights into individual events or types of customer misbehavior, to date, empirical evidence of the antecedents to past misbehaviors and future behavioral intentions is lacking. Synthesizing literature from varied theoretical backgrounds, this study puts forth five personality-based variables (consumer alienation, Machiavellianism, sensation seeking, aggressiveness, and self-esteem) and four demographic variables (gender, income, age, and education) as antecedents to past customer misbehavior. In turn, this study reveals an association between past customer misbehavior and future misbehavior intent. Structural equation modeling procedures using a sample of 380 respondents reveals support for eight of the nine specified hypotheses. The article concludes with a discussion of the study's implications for theory and practice.

Reply

Reply Jean-Marc Regnault My paper was originally written for a scholarly journal specializing in international relations (Revue d'Histoire Diplomatique). Most of the readers of that journal are Francophone (if not Francophile). My paper was aimed at informing these readers (who are not well informed about Pacific islands countries) about what is at stake within the region. In order to do so, I had to express the different arguments concerning nuclear testing. Readers of the current version are sufficiently aware to judge whether or not these arguments are out of date. The fact that religious and nonreligious organizations have contested normally accepted arguments about nuclear testing is not at all hidden in the paper. On the contrary, I indicate at the end of the essay that France must confront opposition and criticisms that have continued to increase, and I name explicitly the institutions that are behind this movement. I regret that some of my critics did not consider the perspectives from which I wrote this essay. It is not possible to say everything in such a short paper; neither is it possible to develop every point of view. Nor is it in the nature of academic journals to be forums offered to militants of this or that cause. It is in the very nature of these journals to offer their readers objective explanations of what is at stake, and through my essay, readers will see that there is no single, politically correct thought on nuclear questions. If the knowledge of these elementary rules had been taken into account, the majority of the criticisms lodged here would never have seen the light of day, although some of them are useful and pertinent. The gravity of certain assertions obliges me unfortunately to neglect the constructive criticisms and instead respond to those that question my intellectual integrity. We must differentiate between a scholarly paper and a militant polemic. [End Page 382] The intellectual narrowness of some militants pushes them to consider that a critical mind leads only to a systematic dismissal of their opponents' arguments. They do not accept that their own arguments are not fully supported. This is why they do not know how to read and understand the terminology I have used. For example, the phrase "the somewhat reassuring IAEA report" that I used does not at all mean that I am reassured by this report but, objectively, that the reading of this report (I was in the amphitheater at the University of French Polynesia when it was presented) shows that the scientists who wrote it are not too anxious. Readers, as far as they are concerned, will think of it what they wish. In no way have I been the agent of the French authorities who put forward the thesis of the "nuclear tests' harmlessness." I have only tried to present what was, and still is, the unchanging official discourse from the French authorities.When I present the vision on the part of Pacific Islanders(or at least, many of them) that nuclear power is an instrument of total destruction, whereas it is seen as a deterrent by the nuclear powers, have I sided with one against the other? The "dialogue" that The Contemporary Pacific offers here is not a proper dialogue, because one party does not attempt to listen to the other one. I regret above all that some criticisms reveal the ignorance of their authors about me as well as the institution to which I belong—the organization of which cannot engender and does not allow closed-mindedness (pensée unique). The crudeness of some of the attacks is disappointing. How could I seriously imagine that my paper would be part of a Free Mason plot to cover up the past misbehavior of the former French Polynesian government? How can I be accused of enlisting my young students into a "Big Brother" way of thinking? How can someone claim that I was uninformed about the Evangelical Church, when I am solicited to publish essays on it in the columns of the local press? My students will laugh at hearing these false allegations. It is more important than ever now, at the moment when the French territories of...

Maternal power assertion in discipline and moral discourse contexts: commonalities, differences, and implications for children's moral conduct and cognition.

Parental power assertion is traditionally studied in the behavioral domain--discipline triggered by the child's immediate misbehavior--but rarely in the cognitive domain--parent-child discussions of the child's past misbehavior. Maternal power assertion was observed in "do" and 'don't" discipline contexts from 14 to 45 months and in the context of mother-child discourse about a recent misbehavior at 56 months. Mothers' use of power cohered across the "do," 'don't," and discourse contexts, but its implications were domain specific. Power assertion in the 'don't" discipline context predicted behavioral outcomes (more moral conduct at 56 and 73 months, less antisocial conduct at 73 months) but not cognitive outcomes (moral cognition at 56 and 73 months). Power assertion in the discourse context predicted less mature moral cognition but not moral or antisocial conduct. Mothers' high Neuroticism predicted more power assertion in all three contexts. Child effects were examined.

The art of medicating hyperkinetic children. A number of practical suggestions.

The psychologic aspects of the prescribing, giving, and taking of medicines are especially important when trying to modify the emotion-laden behavior of hyperkinetic children. The physician should start by cultivating positive expectations in child, parents, and teacher. This is necessary in order to break up existing complex vicious cycles of negative expectations, low self-esteem, discouragement, resentment, misbehavior, and poor achievement. One promotes the child's cooperation by building rapport from the first contact and by negotiating a medication contract directly with him. The child needs to know not only that his past misbehavior of failures are not being held against him but also that better is expected of him now that he has medical help. Parents deserve unhurried clarification of questions and should be warned about side effects. The time taken to talk directly with the teacher is most valuable. Direct communication can help set up positive expectations in school and elicit objective information about the child's day-to-day performance.