In order to survive as a social institution a firm needs a constitutional social contract, even though implicit, among its stakeholders. This social contract must exist if an institution is to be justified. The book focuses on two main issues: To find out the terms of the hypothetical agreement among the firm's stakeholders in an ex ante perspective and to understand the endogenous mechanism generating appropriate incentives that induce to comply with the social contract itself, as seen in the ex post perspective.

This book presents a theory of moral norms and codes of ethics seen as the resolution of decision problems and games situations involving incompleteness of contracts and unforeseen contingencies within firms and organisational hierarchies in general

Autorentext

LUCIANO ANDREOZZI University of Trento, Italy MASAHIKO AOKI Stanford University, USA LEONARDO BECCHETTI University of Rome 'Tor Vergata', Italy AVNER BEN-NER University of Minnesota, USA BRUCE CHAPMAN University of Toronto, Canada ERNIE ENGLANDER George Washington University, USA BRUNO S. FREY University of Zurich, Switzerland ALLEN KAUFMAN University of New Hampshire, USA LI-WEN LIN University of Illinois, USA MARGIT OSTERLOH University of Zurich, Switzerland NOEMI PACE University of Rome 'Tor Vergata', Italy BIDHAN PARMAR University of Virginia, USA LOUIS PUTTERMAN Brown University, USA TING REN Peking University, China LYNN A. STOUT University of California, Los Angeles, USA VIKTOR J. VANBERG University of Freiburg, Germany ANDREW WICKS University of Virginia, USA CYNTHIA A. WILLIAMS University of Illinois, USA OLIVER E. WILLIAMSON University of California, Berkeley, USA HOSSAM ZEITOUN University of Zurich, Switzerland

Inhalt
1 An Overview of the Theory: Hierarchies, Social Contract and Reputation.- 2 Economic Theory and the Social Contract of the Firm.- 3 Games of Reputation and Compliance with the Social Contract.- 4 How Far Does Reputation Extend? Abuse of Authority and Corporate Culture.- 5 Information, Incomplete Contracts and the Ethical Code.- 6 Dealing with Vagueness of Norms: the Theory of Fuzzy Sets.- 7 A Game Theoretic Model of Incomplete Contract and Ethical Code.- 8 Ethical Decision-making Procedure: Vagueness, Default Reasoning and Reputation.- References.- Names Index.