Search results

A fundamental ethical question is how a redistributive system should reward individual effort. Marginal productivity reward has been justified either as a way of ensuring efficiency or as a way of respecting people's self-ownership. Both these arguments have their limitations. We show that marginal productivity reward is implied by one intuitively appealing requirement on the reward structure, which we name non-negative reward. This result can be interpreted in one of two ways. It can be seen as a new justification of marginal productivity reward that avoids the limitations of the traditional arguments. Alternatively, it can be seen as a result showing that any redistributive system that makes transfers conditional on effort, sometimes will make the reward individuals get for their additional effort completely conditional on others effort. Finally, we also show that no genuine redistributive system satisfies both non-negative reward and the liberal requirement of no forced labour.

For equity, societies may wish to eliminate certain forms or manifestations of inequality. Horizontal equity and vertical equity in the income tax are topics which have interested me for some years. Although any shortfall from each of these objectives can be measured in terms of unwanted inequalities, equity per se is a different concept from equality. Equity relates to fairness, justice and other societal norms which give expression to the best aspirations of our collective social conscience. For example, equal access to health care for those in equal need is an accepted norm for horizontal equity in the health field. Vertical equity in this context means treating appropriately differently those who have different needs. When offered the opportunity to be Guest Editor of this volume of Research on Economic Inequality, I decided to define the focus simply as “equity”, without placing any further restriction on topics. The papers which were ultimately included in this volume are the ones, from among those offered, which survived a rigorous refereeing process. Each has its own “take” on the concept of equity, and its link with equality. I hope that you, the reader, will gain from reading all of these contributions and pondering their significance.

Laboratory studies of social interaction have revealed a wide range of phenomena that are difficult to explain using standard economic models. For example, people will often sacrifice their own earnings in order to be generous, cooperative, punitive, and retributive in interactions with anonymous strangers. “Behavioral” models that redefine agents’ preferences attempt to provide an account of these phenomena as reflecting a “taste for fairness” or altruism, aversion to inequality, concern about others’ beliefs, and so on. Such models either fail to account for the rich sensitivity of actions to context or in allowing for rich context-dependence, these models ultimately substitute description for explanation. Hayek’s work provides a foundation for thinking about how to explain these phenomena, by conceiving of people as both purpose-seeking (as in economic models) and rule-following. Decisions are shaped both by material interests and by a normative framework that is evoked by context and helps people decide what one ought to do in a particular situation. The implication of this approach is that rather than trying to understand heterogeneity across individuals in terms of preferences, experimenters should instead try to understand heterogeneity across contexts in terms of the rules and norms that operate in the background and guide or constrain people’s purpose-seeking tendencies. What economics needs, then, is a theory of how and why these rules and norms vary with context as they do.

The innovation process demands an interaction between environment agents, knowledge generators and policies of incentive for innovation and not only development by companies. Universities have gradually become the core of the knowledge production system and, therefore, their role regarding innovation has become more important and diversified. This study is aimed at identifying the mechanisms of university–industry (U–I) collaboration, as well as the operationalization steps of the U–I collaboration process.

This study is aimed at identifying, based on a systematic literature review, the mechanisms of university–industry (U–I) collaboration, as well as the operationalization steps of the U–I collaboration process.

The analysis of the 72 selected articles enabled identifying 15 mechanisms of U–I collaboration, proposing a new classification for such mechanisms and developing a framework presenting the operationalization steps of the interaction process.

In this paper, the authors screened nearly 1,500 papers and analyzed in detail 86 papers addressing U–I collaboration, mechanisms of U–I collaboration and operationalization steps of the U–I collaboration process. This paper provides a new classification for such mechanisms and developing a framework presenting the operationalization steps of the interaction process. This research contributes to both theory and practice by highlighting managerial aspects and stimulating academic research on such timely topic.