Abstract When is state coercion for the provision of public goods justified? And how should social surplus be distributed? Philosophers approach these questions by distinguishing between essential and discretionary goods. This article explains intractability this distinction, presents two upshots. First, if governments provide configurations that simultaneously serve purposes, scope justifiable...

Single-user applications are designed with a ‘discretionary use’ model. In contrast, for large systems, upper management support is considered crucial to adoption. Which applies to groupware? The relatively low cost of groupware reduces high-level visibility, but some argue that social dynamics will force mandated use—the large system approach. Interview studies of recently adopted on-line meet...

In previous work, we addressed how the world sometimes mandates switches in human behaviors [2]. This lead to a characterization of how humans manage such mandatory transitions. In addition to mandatory behavior switches, there are also situations where humans exhibit discretionary behavior switches. In this paper, we present a mathematical characterization of discretionary behavior switches wh...

Discretionary models for evaluating the efficiency of suppliers assume that all criteria are discretionary, i.e., controlled by the management of each supplier and varied at its discretion. These models do not assume supplier selection in the conditions that some factors are nondiscretionary. The objective of this paper is to propose a new pair of Nondiscretionary Factors-Imprecise Data Envelop...

This paper evaluates a comprehensive list of metrics proposed for detecting earnings management in a setting where managers manipulate earnings to round up reported EPS. I find that deferred tax expense is able to detect earnings management in the rounding-up setting while discretionary accruals models are not. Further analysis provides evidence that firms manipulate bad debt expense for the pu...