Few interested in corporate affairs can have missed the demise of Enron. The case involved hugely complex transactions designed to appease regulators, analysts and shareholders; and corporate governance, risk management and internal control were sacrificed in favour of profitability and growth. In this paper Ten’s (1987) theory is used to illustrate the benefit of a combined utilitarian and ret...

A growing body of research has focused on so-called 'utilitarian' judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such 'utilitarian' judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relati...

Though scholars have speculated for centuries on links between individuals' social class standing and approach to moral reasoning, little systematic research exists on how class and morality are associated. Here, we investigate whether the tendency of upper-class individuals to exhibit reduced empathy makes them more likely to resist intuitionist options in moral dilemmas, instead favoring util...

Products can be described by different numbers of attributes, but can the mere number of attributes presented across a choice set influence what type of options people choose? This article demonstrates that attribute numerosity tends to benefit certain types of options more than others and consequently has systematic effects on choice. Because attributes often serve as a heuristic cue for produ...

We introduce a new class of rules for resolving quasilinear social choice problems. These rules extend those of Green [6]. We call such rules multi-utilitarian rules. Each multi-utilitarian rule is associated with a probability measure over the set of weighted utilitarian rules, and is derived as the expectation of this probability. These rules are characterized by the axioms efficiency, transl...

Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. Howeve...

Biodiversity plays an integral role in the livelihoods of subsistence-based forest-dwelling communities and as a consequence it is increasingly important to develop quantitative approaches that capture not only changes in taxonomic diversity, but also variation in natural resources and provisioning services. We apply a functional diversity metric originally developed for addressing questions in...

Online shopping value involving perceived utilitarian value and perceived hedonic value affect consumer behaviour intention. Studies on the effects of Web site characteristics on online group buying behavior through online shopping value are scant. Thus, this study investigates the effects of information richness and navigation of GROUPON Taiwan Web site characteristics on online group buying i...