Search results

Ethical attitudes are especially important for accounting students as they transition from higher education into a profession where continuing education requirements for ethics are pervasive across state boards. We examine if generational categorization impacts ethical attitudes. We compare 172 student responses from an ethical survey to results reported in the prior literature from 1997, 2004, and 2007. We find evidence consistent with current students becoming less tolerant of ethically questionable behavior. Also, we explore students with self-declared Certified Public Accountant (CPA) aspirations to other students revealing minimal differences. This suggests that discussions around ethical attitudes might be beneficial in the workplace as multigenerational individuals need to make subjective decisions when working together. More specifically, our study encourages the development of additional ethical vignettes that include technological innovation twists to foster more robust classroom ethics discussions as many students fail to find a significant ethical gray area with the traditional vignettes.

We investigate how online price dispersion has evolved since the bursting of the Internet bubble by comparing price dispersion levels in years 2000, 2001, and 2003 and between multi-channel and pure play e-tailers. The results show that although online price dispersion declined between 2000 and 2001 when there was a shakeout in Internet retailing, it increased from 2001 to 2003, the post bubble period, in particular, for desktop computers, laptop computers, PDAs, electronics and software. The proportion of items for which price dispersion at multi-channel retailers was higher than that at pure play e-tailers, increased steadily during 2000–2003. These findings suggest that online price dispersion is persistent even as Internet markets mature.

To explain how the components of attraction theory work in unison to prompt students to take an initial stimulus and progress through critical thinking processes and into knowledge acquisition, organization, and synthesis.

Although schema theory has an important role in understanding knowledge acquisition, it does not provide directives for how to plan instruction so students can build their understandings and comprehension of subject matter. This chapter outlines a pedagogical approach to the implementation of a new theory of learning that builds on cognitive science, affect, and interest.

Students can become re-attracted to learning through effective teaching inclusive of a jolt, curiosity, retrieving explanations, counterexamples, clarifications, and embedding that information within schemata.

Proactive investigations and continued research on attraction theory can enrich our understanding of teaching and learning, provide answers for what works in the classroom, and equip us with tools from which to select for unique classroom circumstances.

This study examines the effectiveness of instruction in accounting ethics as measured by the impact of that instruction on the incidence of student plagiarism in a college writing assignment.

This study avoids the potential problems inherent in measuring Machiavellianism via a psychological questionnaire by using a “reverse methodology,” whereby Machiavellianism is assessed directly from behavior.

The results support past research suggesting that traditional collegiate ethical education may not affect students’ ethical choices. The findings also suggest that increasing penalties for ethical failures may be an effective means of deterring students and business professionals from engaging in inappropriate activities.

This study supports the use of a behavioral measure of Machivellianism as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of alternative instructional methods in ethics. This behavioral approach is superior to the traditional questionnaire methodology because Machivellianism is judged based on actual behavior rather than having students respond to hypothetical and often stereotyped ethical cases, whereby the student can provide an artificial response that will be viewed favorably by the evaluator.

The findings suggest that higher education needs to recognize the relevance of factors beyond mere ethical education when preparing students for the ethical challenges they will face in the business world.

This paper employs a unique “reverse methodology” to measure Machiavellianism. This reverse methodology has greater external validity in quasi-experimental ethical studies because the results can be extrapolated to real-world scenarios where there is a cost to behaving ethically.

In this study negotiated exchange under the 1-exchange rule is considered in the whole population of 142,660 exchange networks up to size 9. A review shows that 51 of these networks have been studied in the literature. Predictions for the whole population of networks are derived by parsimonious versions of power-dependence and exchange-resistance theory. All but 301 networks are classified similarly as equal, weak, or strong power networks by the power-dependence and exchange-resistance theory. Only 4% of the networks is classified as a strong power network, as opposed to the 43% of the networks studied in the literature.

In this chapter, the authors discuss the process of embedding experiential learning in a required ethics and diversity course (ED200). The course is a model of humanistic education in which students develop disciplinary-based methodological expertise while also drawing on cross-disciplinary, inclusive, problem-solving skills. The authors suggest that in a course that challenges students to think about their lives in community, engagement with that community plays a critical role in humanizing the learning experience. This pedagogical emphasis on experiential learning, instantiated as community engagement, unites the foci of ethics and diversity through students’ practical application of and reflection on their experiences to enhance ethical and cultural self-awareness. In the process, it also fosters a desire for participatory and justice-oriented citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). In what follows, the authors provide a history of the development of ED200. The authors then justify the inclusion of experiential learning in the course from theoretical and practical perspectives: Why is it valuable to include experiential learning in this course and how does it advance the goal of developing critically engaged citizens through improving ethical reasoning skills and actionable understanding of diversity? Last, the authors detail positive impacts and implementation challenges and indicate next steps for continued development.

Services now play a remarkably prominent role in modern economies. Not surprisingly, economists and marketing researchers have begun to turn their attention to the analysis of activities in the so-called tertiary sector. In this chapter we attempt to contribute to the effort of systematizing the analysis of service institutions by integrating perspectives from the economic analysis of institutions and property rights, on the one hand, and the economic analysis of retailing and distribution services, on the other hand In so doing, we propose a set of evaluative criteria to be applied to the assessment of the evolution of service institutions, as well as a tableau for analyzing the emergence of various institutional forms. The tableau organizes the three primitive economic activities of production, distribution, and consumption on temporal and spatial dimensions. As such, the tableau applies the notion of relational constraints that have the property of reducing uncertainty and transaction costs, thus being welfare enhancing. The tableau and the evaluative criteria enable us to explore a range of issues, such as joint-ness of production and consumption, divided ownership of property rights, and the effects of technological progress that are inherent in the process of product innovation in services.

Conventional tests of the regression discontinuity design’s identifying restrictions can perform poorly when the running variable is discrete. This paper proposes a test for manipulation of the running variable that is consistent when the running variable is discrete. The test exploits the fact that if the discrete running variable’s probability mass function satisfies a certain smoothness condition, then the observed frequency at the threshold has a known conditional distribution. The proposed test is applied to vote tally distributions in union representation elections and reveals evidence of manipulation in close elections that is in favor of employers when Republicans control the NLRB and in favor of unions otherwise.