Self-interest Attitudes Research Articles

The Lumberworks Agent: When Trust and Integrity Matter to the Agent

The problem of the principal-agent relationship is one that has plagued human transactions since time immemorial. Information asymmetry and moral hazard, (Eisenhardt, 1989) make it difficult to achieve the levels of trust that could reassure the principal that the agent’s interest is aligned to his, especially when viewed against the background understanding of man as ‘homo oeconomicus’, characterised by an utility maximizing perspective (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). Fligstein and Freeland (1995) identified the problems as issues of internal control, especially of hierarchy and motivation, and mention that they commonly occur where there is management on one side and workers on the other, or ownership on one side with control on the other, or division of labour into several levels of management.Agency theory postulates that once incentives are appropriately structured and information is made more symmetrical, agents will work in favour of their principals (Eisenhardt, 1989). Time and experience have shown that there may be other variables at work and that there is a need to exercise caution in applying agency theory (Donaldson and Davis, 1991). A single case study of Lumberworks Ltd. is used to explore, validate and extend these ideas, following the suggestion by Tosi and Gomez Mejia (1989) that there may be need to research agency theory using other behavioural science methodologies other than the psychometric approach commonly favoured, in order to enrich the understanding of the effects of monitoring and incentive alignment efforts. According to Yin (1984), looking at a phenomenon in a real life context makes it more intelligible and guides our further understanding of its confines and its reaches.Thus, using single case methodology, this paper suggests that monitoring and incentive structures, the most common responses to principal-agent concerns, are limited in their effectiveness and that a trust-building approach is what is needed to achieve the much sought after alignment of interests. Since trust can only be built where there is integrity, it would seem that integrity is what really matters to the agent, and a culture of integrity is what will grow mutual trust in such a way as to resolve all the conflicts thrown up within the agency relationship.The paper also suggests that there may be some institutional differences across cultures which affect principal-agent relationships and that, in Nigeria in particular, and perhaps for countries in similar emergent economic conditions, a deinstitutionalization perspective may be very useful. In such a case, the trust-building approach based on fostering a culture of integrity still is the solution, since it tends to generate a deeper and more long-lasting solution to both agency and institutionalization problems related to instances of negative work ethic. Further research could be aimed at exploring the distinct steps towards building cultures of integrity and the possibilities of deinstitutionalizing negative and or self-interested attitudes and replacing them with productive and other-regarding ones through education and training activity.

L'economia dei primitivi

This article aims to interpret the debate on the behaviour of the first human communities, in particular their big game and food sharing practices, through a simple model where the big preys are characterised as public goods. Anthropologists and economists alike have discussed the issue from two opposite points of view. The first assumes essentially self-interested preferences and interpret cooperation for hunting big preys as a consequence of choices under the uncertainty veil. The second one considers non self-interested attitudes such as inequality aversion or strong reciprocity. Using the former interpretation, it can be shown that the mutual cooperation is unanimously preferred, under restrictive assumptions on the payoffs. Using the latter, two Nash equilibria can exist. Moreover, if strong reciprocity is assumed, the equilibrium can be evolutionarily stable. This possibility is strenghtened if strong reciprocity is characterised by the transfer to the cooperators of the sanction assigned to the free riders.

The effects of priming legal concepts on perceived trust and competitiveness, self-interested attitudes, and competitive behavior

Socio-legal scholars have suggested that, as a ubiquitous social system, law shapes social reality and provides interpretive frameworks for social relations. Across five studies, we tested the idea that the law shapes social reality by fostering the assumptions that people are self-interested, untrustworthy, and competitive. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that people implicitly associated legal concepts with competitiveness. Studies 3-5 showed that these associations had implications for social perceptions, self-interested attitudes, and competitive behavior. After being primed with constructs related to the law, participants perceived social actors as less trustworthy and the situation as more competitive (Study 3), became more against a political issue when it conflicted with their normative self-interest (Study 4), and made more competitive choices during a prisoner's dilemma game when they believed that social relations were basically zero-sum in nature (Study 5). The implications and applications of these results are discussed. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

‘The Righteous Considereth the Cause of the Poor’? Public Attitudes Towards Poverty in Developing Countries

Events in 2005 such as the G8 Summit in Gleneagles and the Make Poverty History campaign have been successful in focusing the public's attention on the problem of world poverty. Despite these high-profile events and consistently high levels of public support for development assistance programmes, people's understanding of poverty and development issues remains shallow and levels of official development aid for many OECD countries fall well below the 0.7 per cent GDP goal. In this article we examine what factors drive individual-level attitudes of concern for poverty, how the media portray poverty in developing countries and how media portrayal affects individuals' concern for poverty. Drawing on extant literature on motivations for aid, we argue that individual concern for poverty can stem from self-interest or moral drivers. However, the implications of the different drivers do not appear to be well understood, yet they have important consequences for DFID and the OECD; strategies based on preference-accommodation rather than preference-shaping strategies may undermine rather than strengthen public concern for poverty. The data for the article come from DFID's 2005 Omnibus survey of public attitudes towards development and a content analysis of eight UK newspapers from January to December 2005. Using a binary logistic regression model we estimate individual concern for poverty in developing countries as a function of moral judgements, self-interest, awareness of poverty and assessments of achieving Millennium Development Goals, controlling for a host of demographic variables. Results from the content analysis show that economic and political frames dominate media coverage of poverty in developing countries. We find differential effects for moral and self-interested attitudes on concern for poverty; moral attitudes are positively related to concern, whereas self-interested attitudes are negatively related to concern.

Clinical Ethical Dilemmas for Vascular Surgeons (The VASCUETHICS Study): Are Self-interest Attitudes Related to Professional Seniority?

Objective. To evaluate the association between professional seniority and self-interest (PSI) attitudes in the resolution of vascular ethical dilemmas (VED). Design. Cross-sectional. Subjects. Vascular surgeons (residents included) from the 28 vascular teaching departments of Spain. Measurements. Multidisciplinary team-designed questionnaire of 5 VED. Each VED had 3 different answers (attitudes): 2 favouring legitimate ethical attitudes (LEA) and 1 favouring PSI. The questionnaire was self-administered and all participants stated their degree of agreement with each answer on a continuous Likert scale. PSI was evaluated by: (1) adding the magnitudes of the 5 answers favouring PSI (absPSI); and (2) by comparing in each case the magnitude of the PSI answer with that of the 2 LEA (relPSI). Statistics. Linear regression adjusted by confounding factors. Results. Two hundred and fifty-three vascular surgeons from the 26 participating teaching vascular departments of public hospitals completed the questionnaire (87.5% surgeons/department). Surgeon characteristics were: (1) median age 37 years; (2) 187 (74%) male; (3) 59 (23%) brought up with a health professional relative; (4) 94 (38%) had additional private practice; (5) 133 (65%) professed religious beliefs; and (6) 1–10 years of experience in 116 (47%), 11–20 years in 58 (24%), 21–30 years in 57 (23%), and >30 years in 15 (6%). The multivariate analysis disclosed that for every 10-years rise in professional seniority there was a 3.2% increase in absPSI ( p=0.007, adjusted by variables 3 and 4), and a 3.4% increase in relPSI ( p=0.002, adjusted by variable 5). Conclusions. Professional seniority is associated with a slight increase in pro-PSI attitudes in cases of vascular ethical dilemma. Both vascular surgeons and health institutions should promote the reversal of this worrying tendency.

Moral Values, Social Trust and Inequality: Can Values Explain Crime?

Cross-national social attitude data from the World Values Surveys (1981-1983, 1990) were analysed to explore whether values can explain' crime. Mirroring patterns of offending and in contrast to other values, tolerance for a sub-group of materially self-interested attitudes were found to be significantly higher in men, younger people, larger cities, and had increased over time. These self-interested values were also found to be associated with victimization rates at the national level as measured by the International Crime Victimisation Surveys. Multivariate models incorporating self-interested values, economic inequality, social trust and the interaction between these variables explained two-thirds of variance in victimization at the national level. Implications and contrast with the previous literature are discussed.

Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense

It has long been recognized that eighteenth-century Scotland gave birth to political economy as a sophisticated scholarly discipline. Hailing from a relatively impoverished nation that had joined its larger southern neighbor in 1707 to form a new British state, Adam Smith and other Scottish political economists were concerned not only with observing, describing, and explaining the realities of economic life as they saw them but also with leading Scotland toward material progress and wealth. It has also been recognized, however, that in Scotland political economy was a branch of a remarkably comprehensive academic discipline known as moral philosophy, and that Scottish moralists were acutely sensitive to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in economic growth. At times this sensitivity was expressed through the language of the civic humanist or classical republican tradition, which emphasized public virtue, a unified civic personality that joined the private individual with the public citizen, and economic independence based on land ownership, as opposed to the blatantly self-interested attitudes and activities associated with the accumulation of commercial wealth. This tension between modernization and morality, wealth and virtue, accounts for much of the recent interest in the social thought of the Scottish Enlightenment.1

Whites' Opposition to “Busing”: Self-interest or Symbolic Politics?

This article contrasts the “self-interest” and “symbolic politics” explanations for the formation of mass policy preferences and voting behavior. Self-interested attitudes are defined as those supporting policies that would maximize benefits and minimize costs to the individual's private material well-being. The “symbolic politics” model emphasizes pressures to make adulthood attitudes consistent with the residues of preadult socialization. We compare the two models in terms of their ability to account for whites' opposition to busing school children for racial integration of the public schools, and the role of the busing issue in presidential voting decisions, using the 1972 Center for Political Studies election study. Regression analysis shows strong effects of symbolic attitudes (racial intolerance and political conservatism) on opposition to busing, and of the busing issue on presidential voting decisions. Self-interest (e.g., having children susceptible to busing) had no significant effect upon either. It is concluded that self-interest is often overestimated as a determinant of public opinion and voting behavior because it is too rarely directly assessed empirically.