Tag: business ethics

Price fixing

Samsung Electronics of South Korea, the world’s largest maker of memory chips, has agreed to pay $90 million to settle civil charges that it conspired with six other makers of computer chips to fix prices, the attorneys general of 41 states announced. (…) The other companies involved included Infineon Technologies, Mosel Vitelic, Nanya Technology, Elpida Memory and NEC Electronics America.

Five of the companies have paid $310 million to settle separate actions brought by direct buyers, like small computer makers and repair shops. (IHT)

Looking for work from work

In workplaces where high-speed broadband Internet access is typically available and 60-hour workweeks are commonplace, many employees believe that the office is the most convenient or effective place to do a job search. And people who are unhappy with their jobs sometimes believe that they are entitled to use the workplace to find something better. (…)[M]ost employees, especially those under 40, saw themselves as “free agents” who would search for jobs from their offices as a matter of course.

Employees working 50- or 60-hour weeks (…) are often too exhausted to look for jobs when they are outside the office. (IHT)

What say you?

Controlling corruption: legal or cultural?

A recent article [pdf] with an astute metric:

Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural experiment, the stationing of thousands of diplomats from around the world in New York City.

Diplomatic immunity means there was essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations, allowing us to examine the role of cultural norms alone. This generates a revealed preference measure of corruption based on real-world behavior for government officials all acting in the same setting. We find tremendous persistence in corruption norms: diplomats from high corruption countries (based on existing survey-based indices) have significantly more parking violations.