CHR for Social Responsibility

Publicly traded corporations often operate against the public’s interest, serving a very limited group of stakeholders. This is counter-intuitive, since the public as a whole owns these corporations through direct investment in the stock-market, as well as indirect investment in mutual, index, and pension funds. Interestingly, the public’s role in the proxy voting process, which allows shareholders to influence their company’s direction and decisions, is essentially ignored by individual investors. We speculate that a prime reason for this lack of participation is information overload, and the disproportionate efforts required for an investor to make an informed decision. In this paper we propose a CHR based model that significantly simplifies the decision making process, allowing users to set general guidelines that can be applied to every company they own to produce voting recommendations. The use of CHR here is particularly advantageous as it allows users to easily track back the most relevant data that was used to formulate the decision, without the user having to go through large amounts of irrelevant information. Finally we describe a simplified algorithm that could be used as part of this model. 1998 ACM Subject Classification D.3.2 Language Classifications Constraint and logic languages, H.4.2 Types of Systems – Decision support, K.4.3 [Computers and Society] Organizational Impacts