Il PNRR presentato al Parlamento dal Governo Conte (Senato della Repubblica, Proposta di piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, gennaio 2021) ha avuto varie versioni a partire dalle prime formulazioni, che si presentavano come una raccolta di proge!i senza una chiara finalizzazione, obbie!ivi generali e conseguenze a!ese. Esso ha subìto modificazioni anche grazie ai contributi di idee ed indicazioni di diversi sogge!i della società civile collegati al mondo accademico. La stessa versione al vaglio delle Commissioni di Camera e Senato è ogge!o di commenti e posposte di miglioramento (si veda il documento del Forum Disuguaglianze e Diversità del 12 gennaio 2021). Ulteriori revisioni ed adeguamenti saranno apportati dal governo Draghi, e a tale proposito l'auspicio è che il metodo del dialogo sociale diventi sistematico e trasparente piu!osto che essere accantonano (c'è qualche ragionevole timore al riguardo) in favore di un approccio che, per brevità, chiamerò "tecnocratico"
Developing a corporate code of ethics amounts to something like playing the role of a 'constitution designer' on a small scale. It is an experiment of rational decision about the general and abstract norms that have towork as constitutional constraints on a 'corporate actor' – that is, a firm seen as amicro-constitutional order (Coleman 1990; Vanberg 1992). Codes of ethics in fact regulate claims and rights that several stakeholders may advance towards the organization, so that, when these claims are legitimate by the institution of a code of ethics, those who govern the firm must respond and to be accountable for them.
In her insightful paper Helen Alford makes several interesting points concerning the current state of stakeholder theory and the contribution of a neo-Thomist and personalist perspective to the foundation of CSR. Let me divide some of them between a pars destruens and a pars construens, not to give a complete reconstruction of her argument but just to focus on what I shall discuss in this comment.
This essay seeks to give a contractarian foundation to the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), meant as an extended model of corporate governance of the firm. It focuses on justification according to the contractarian point of view (leaving compliance and implementation problems to a related article, [Sacconi 2004b, forthcoming in the Journal of Business Ethics]). It begins by providing a definition of CSR as an extended model of corporate governance, based on the fiduciary duties owed to all the firm's stakeholders. Then, by establishing the basic context of incompleteness of contracts and abuse of authority, it analyses how the extended view of corporate governance arises directly from criticism of the contemporary neo-institutional economic theory of the firm. Thereafter, an application of the theory of bargaining games is used to deduce the structure of a multi-stakeholder firm, on the basis of the idea of a constitutional contract, which satisfies basic requirements of impartial justification and accordance with intuitions of social justice. This is a sequential model of constitutional bargaining, whereby a constitution is first chosen, and then a post-constitutional coalition game is played. On the basis of the unique solution given to each step in the bargaining model, the quest for a prescriptive theory of governance and strategic management is accomplished, so that I am able to define an objective-function for the firm consistent with the idea of CSR. Finally, a contractarian potential explanation for the emergence of the multi-fiduciary firm is provided.
Liuc Papers n. 142, Serie Etica, Diritto ed Economia 10, suppl. a febbraio 2004. This paper first sets a definition of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an extended model of corporate governance and then accounts for a voluntary approach to CSR, meant as voluntary compliance with CSR strategic management standards, in terms of an economic theory of self-regulation based on the concepts of social contract, reputation and reciprocal conformism. The paper argues that extended fiduciary duties toward all the firm's stakeholders are needed because of the same neo-institutional analysis of the firm that justifies it as a unified system of governance of economic transactions based on authority relations and residual rights of control. The key concept here is that of abuse of firm's authority vis-à-vis the stakeholders who hold incomplete contracts with the firm. Extended fiduciary duties are singled out from the model of a Social Contract amongst the firm's stakeholders. This provide for a clear cut and calculable criterion of strategic management no less able to set a bottom-line to the firm management than the profit maximisation principle, while being able of answering legitimate claims of fair treatment from all the firm's stakeholders. Such a task is accomplished by an application of the theory of bargaining games to the Social Contract of the firm, which employs the Nash-Harsanyi bargaining solution as a normative criterion for strategic management and corporate governance, providing an answer to the deficit of uniqueness problem raised by Michael Jensen (2001) against the notion of stakeholders value. Then, the paper distinguishes two models of self regulation (the discretionary one, and the explicit-norms-cum-self-enforcement one) and argues that while incomplete contracts and imperfect knowledge debar form resorting to reputation effects in order to support discretional self-regulation, on the contrary an explicit standard for CSR strategic management, based on general and abstract business ethics principles and precautionary protocols and rules of behaviour - both publicly shared by stakeholders and firms through social dialog - make possible to put again at work the reputation mechanism inducing endogenous incentives of compliance with a voluntary standard. The paper here suggests how (by both fuzzy logic and default reasoning ) a CSR Strategic Management Standard may work as a cognitive gap filling tool with respect to the firm's commitments and the stakeholders' expectations in presence of incomplete information. Moreover recent developments in the theory of conformist non-purely-self-interested preferences add motivational force to the basic result about self-enforcement of a CSR management standard. Hence, conformist preferences solve the problem of optimal mixed strategies that otherwise could enable the firm inducing the stakeholders to "trust" it without really conforming to a CSR standard. This result is given a formal proof in sec.11. The paper concludes with a collusion-proof design of intermediate social bodies (civil society institutions) that may answer the demand for assurance and external verifiability of CSR standards compliance by independent third-parties.
What is, if any, the distinctive comparative advantage of the non profit enterprise? One line of theorizing, which I want to pursue in this paper, is that the non profit enterprise (in short NPE) is able to attract ideological entrepreneurs and workers (Rose-Ackerman 1996). "Ideologues" are agents committed the principles of a given philosophy of service, a "mission" in a field of provision and distribution of some welfare good or service. In terms of the idea of "basic institutions" of society (Rawls 1971), a "mission" may be understood as typically the endeavour of providing some "primary goods" such as health, education, culture, basic income (that is the basis of self-respect) and ideologues are individuals committed to the institutional mission of providing a "primary good" and its fair distribution.
Liuc Papers n. 143, Serie Etica, Diritto ed Economia 11, suppl. a febbraio 2004. Questo saggio propone una definizione di responsabilità sociale dell'impresa come modello di corporate governance "estesa" e chiarisce l'idea di approccio volontario alla CSR, inteso come osservanza volontaria a standard di gestione strategica volti alla CSR, sulla base di una teoria economica dell''autoregolazione. In primo luogo si argomenta che i doveri fiduciari verso gli stakeholder sono necessari proprio a causa dell'analisi neo-istituzionalista dell'impresa intesa come sistema di governo unificato delle transazioni basato sull'autorità e il diritto residuale di controllo. Il concetto chiave è qui quello di abuso di autorità nei confronti di stakeholder legati all'impresa da contatti incompleti . In secondo luogo i doveri fiduciari sono ricavati dal modello del contratto sociale dell'impresa tra i suoi stakeholder. Questo consente di dedurre un criterio di gestione strategica e governo non meno capace di fissare il termine di giudizio per la gestione dell'impresa di quanto lo sia la massimizzazione del profitto e al contempo in grado di rispondere alle legittime pretese dei diversi stakeholder dell'impresa. Ciò è permesso da un'applicazione della teoria dei giochi di contrattazione al contatto sciale dell'impresa, che permette di usare la soluzione di Nash-Harsanyi come criterio normativo per la gestione strategica e il governo dell'impresa e consente di rispondere con una soluzione calcolabile alla critica circa la mancanza di un criterio univoco, sollevata da Jensen (2001) contro l'idea di stakeholder value. Terzo, si distingue tra due modelli di autoregolazione (quello discrezionale e quello dell'adesione volontaria a norme esplicite) e si argomenta che mentre l'incompletezza contrattuale e la conoscenza imperfetta escludono il ricorso agli effetti di reputazione nel caso della autoregolazione discrezionale, al contrario uno standard esplicito di gestione strategica volta alla CSR, basato su principi generali espliciti di etica degli affari e su protocolli precauzionali e regole di condotta preventive -tutti pubblicamente condivisi tra stakeholder e impresa sulla base del dialogo sociale - consentono di riattivare il meccanismo reputazione inducendo incentivi endogeni alla loro osservanza. A questo punto si offre una spiegazione della logica che presiede a uno standard di CSR per la gestione strategica (basata sulle logiche fuzzy e dei default) grazie alla quale esso opera come un gap filling cognitivo rispetto agli impegni dell'impresa e alle aspettative degli stakeholder in presenza di informazione incompleta. Inoltre la recente teoria delle preferenze conformiste e non puramente autointeressate aggiunge ulteriore forza motivazionale al risultato base circa l'auto-imposizione di uno standard di CSR. Il saggio si conclude con il progetto di un istituzione multi-stakeholder a prova di collusione , intesa come corpo intermedio della società, in grado di rispondere alla domanda di credibilità e di verifica esterna, da parte di soggetti indipendenti di terza parte, circa l'osservanza degli standard di CSR .
LIUC PAPERS 91- Etica, diritto ed economia, 1. ottobre 2001. Corporations allocate to they corporate governance structures authority over a large part of the transactions they carry out, both regulated by (incomplete) labour contracts or by (incomplete) arm's length contract. These contracts, as the eventuality of unforeseen contingencies is anticipated, are completed by residual rights of control allocating discretion upon ex ante non-contractible decisions to one party in the contract. Ownership and control structures respond to a need of minimising some transaction costs, but also admit the risk of abuse of authority. Both empirical investigation and theoretical deduction from the theory of firm suggest that corporations need systems of self-regulatory norms of behaviour like codes of ethics exactly because of the 'abuse of authority' problem. One requirement that a code of ethics must satisfy is to answer the question how who holds authority in the firm may undertake commitments over events and situations that cannot be ex ante contractible nor describable. This paper suggests a first modelling of unforeseen contingencies in terms of fuzzy sets theory. Incomplete knowledge about unforeseen contingencies is captured by defining some events as fuzzy sub-sets of the set of unforeseen states of the world. Such events correspond to terms of the ex ante language used to define the domain of general abstract principles. The cost of their all-encompassing nature is vagueness. This opens the route to define domains of abstract principles as fuzzy sets of unforeseen states of the world. Then a model is suggested of the reasoning the players perform, given this incomplete (vague) base of knowledge, in order to jump from vague premises to what it has to be done in any unforeseen contingency. Players' inferences are understood according to the logic of default reasoning. The intuition is that, given our limited knowledge, we extend our belief that the "normal course" does in fact hold also to the unforeseen situations. As a consequence are defined commitments that a player conforming to the code is expected to carry out. This allows replicating within the new context some well-known results in the theory of reputation games.
LIUC PAPERS-41 Serie Economia e Impresa 10, maggio 1997 In this essay I suggest a first-best solution to the collusion problem in a three-levels principal-supervisor-agent hierarchy (Tirole 1986, Laffont-Tirole 1993) in the context of a repeated games model. I introduce a new player in the component game i.e. a group of consumers which is also modelled as the constituency of the principal. An ex ante incomplete constitutional contract of authorisation links the principal to the group of consumer. At the next move in the game the group of consumers has a choice on the level of support and compliance to the principal's authority, which I intend as a specific investment. Due to the incompleteness of contracts problem, according to the economic theory of corporate culture (Kreps 1990) and code of ethics (Sacconi 1997), the principal may only announce a code of basic principles of good administration, being not automatically enforceable. In the repeated game among the three levels hierarchy and an infinite series of short-lived groups of consumers/supporters, I prove by a reputation effects construction (Fudenberg-Levine 1989, 1992) that the first best contract offered by the principal to the supervisor and the agent is part of a self-enforcing equilibrium profile making possible to the principal to get a payoff that approximates the Stakelberg payoff in nearly all the component games.
Quali sono i criteri e le modalità per realizzare oggi una efficace rendicontazione sociale delle organizzazioni non profit? Quali particolari attenzioni bisogna avere anche alla luce dei recenti interventi legislativi, a partire dal Codice del Terzo Settore? Negli ultimi anni il ruolo del non profit è cresciuto e ci si attende possa aumentare ancora. La legislazione italiana si è impegnata per rendere omogeneo il quadro, prima con il Codice, poi con i successivi decreti riguardanti la rendicontazione e la valutazione dell'impatto sociale. È proprio considerando questo complessivo cambiamento che il GBS ha ritenuto necessario rivedere il proprio documento di ricerca n. 10 del 2009, riflettendo ancora sulle prospettive del Terzo Settore nella realtà italiana e proponendo alcuni capisaldi operativi che – secondo il GBS – dovrebbero contraddistinguere e rendere più efficace la rendicontazione sociale nel non profit. Il documento di ricerca è diviso in due parti: una prima che richiama e commenta le recenti iniziative legislative e riflette nuovamente sulla natura e il ruolo del non profit nel nostro Paese e una seconda che fornisce indicazioni operative per una più efficace applicazione delle Linee guida ministeriali.
By considering what we identify as a problem inherent in the 'nature of the firm'—the risk of abuse of authority—we propound the conception of a social contract theory of the firm which is truly Rawlsian in its inspiration. Hence, we link the social contract theory of the firm (justice at firm's level) with the general theory of justice (justice at society's level). Through this path, we enter the debate about whether firms can be part of Rawlsian theory of justice showing that corporate governance principles enter the "basic structure." Finally, we concur with Sen's aim to broaden the realm of social justice beyond what he calls the 'transcendental institutional perfectionism' of Rawls' theory. We maintain the contractarian approach to justice but introduce Sen's capability concept as an element of the constitutional and post-constitutional contract model of institutions with special reference to corporate governance. Accordingly, rights over primary goods and capabilities are (constitutionally) granted by the basic institutions of society, but many capabilities have to be turned into the functionings of many stakeholders through the operation of firms understood as post-constitutional institutional domains. The constitutional contract on the distribution of primary goods and capabilities should then shape the principles of corporate governance so that at post-constitutional level anyone may achieve her/his functionings in the corporate domain by exercising such capabilities. In the absence of such a condition, post-constitutional contracts would distort the process that descends from constitutional rights and capabilities toward social outcomes.
LIUC PAPERS. 145, Etica, diritto ed economia, 12, supplemento a marzo 2004. The Q-RES management model described in the Q-RES Guidelines takes into account the issue of its verifiability by external bodies and it proposes the definition of a Q-RES Standard on which the external verification and the certification of Corporate Social Responsibility of an organisation may be based. In order to develop Q-RES into a certifiable standard on management, we first referred to the most recent body of standard on management systems (ISO 9000. 2000 ed.) and took into consideration the ISO 9004 standard that includes, besides the typical contents of guidelines, the prescriptive test of the norm that can be certified (ISO 9001) thus adding the relationship with the stakeholders to the work. By adapting the ISO 900 standard with reference to the Q-RES model we tried to produce a "certifiable" standard that might be easily understood by experts. This was possible because it was structured like other standards ( that are very similar) and it can be integrated with other well-known management systems. The "Q-RES Standard: Norm and Guidelines for the improvement of ethical and social performances of the organisations" was developed as a standard consisting of two parts: Part A: "The Q-RES model and tools for the management of ethical and social responsibility of organisations" Part B: "The management system for ethical and social responsibility" Part A introduces and explains the Q-RES model and tools for the management of ethical and social responsibility of organisations; its relationship with other management systems and with ISO 9000; its purpose and field of application and the standards of reference and a glossary of terms and definitions. Part B of the Q-RES standard describes the management system of an organisation with respect to the ethical and social responsibility in which all the Q-RES tools can be found: the Corporate Ethical Vision and Code of Ethics are discussed under Responsibilities of Management; Ethical Training is discussed under Resource Management; Organisational systems and internal control are discussed under Product realisation; Social and Ethical Accountability is discussed
Liuc Papers n. 115, Serie Etica, Diritto ed Economia 8, novembre 2002. We provide an account of the non profit enterprise based on the motivations of the agents involved. Our main idea is that these are ex-post motivated by both self-interest and a conditional willingness to conform to their ex ante accepted constitutional ideology, which are weighed up in a comprehensive utility function. Ideology is shaped as the result of a hypothetical 'social' contract between the relevant figures participating in the venture, in particular an entrepreneur, a worker, and a consumer who acts as a dummy beneficiary in the ex-post stage. It can thus be defined as a normative principle of fairness that boils down to a distributive social welfare function defined over the outcomes of a game, which permits to order them according to their conformity to the constitutional ideology. For conformist preferences depend upon expectations of reciprocal conformity to a normative principle, defined on social states described in as much they conform to an ideal, then the agents' model of choice asks for the adoption of the psychological games approach, where payoff functions range over not only the players' strategies but also their beliefs. If the conformist prompt to action is sufficiently strong then the outcome in which both the active agents perform an action improving the quality of the good with respect to the free market standard, thus maximising the surplus of the consumers, results in a psychological Nash equilibrium of the game. We associate this outcome, and the corresponding norm of behaviour, with the constitution of the non profit enterprise. We also show that the structure of the interaction is a coordination game, thus calling for the necessity of devices such as codes of ethics to solve the coordination problem
LIUC PAPERS 104, Etica, diritto ed economia, 6-aprile 2002 (2 edizione). This paper concerns the role that norms play in the emergence and selection of equilibrium points seen as social conventions under unforeseen contingencies – that is in the emergence of regularities of behaviour which are self-enforcing and effectively adhered to by limited rational agents due to their self-policing incentives. We define two version of a basic demand game such that in each of them players know that a given solution (norm) is shared knowledge (the Nash product and the typical non cooperative solution of a DP – both coinciding to equilibrium points of the demand game). The basic incomplete knowledge situation is then introduced by assuming that a move of Nature selects states of world where one of the two versions of the basic game will be played. However some of the states of the world that nature may choose are unforeseen. Thus players, when nature has made its choice, will face states that they ex post know to occurs, but that are vaguely described in terms of their ex ante knowledge about the rules of the game. Unforeseen contingencies are then modelled as states that can belong to events defined in terms of the ex ante base of knowledge only through fuzzy membership functions. Players must decide which strategy to play under this characteristic lack of clear information, i.e. under vagueness on the game they are going to play. Their information is resumed by a fuzzy measure of membership that induces a possibility distribution but does not allow them a shared knowledge of the norms (solution), which is played in the given game. Consequently there is no basis at this stage to infer that everybody know that a given equilibrium will be played and to conclude that a player must use his best response belonging to a given equilibrium solution. A default reasoning process here enters the scene, based on the reformulation of default logic in terms of possibility theory given - after Zadeh - by Dubois, Prade and Benferhat. At the first step of the recursive reasoning process, each player's first hypothetical choice, given the basic vague knowledge about the game they are going to play, is calculated in term of a fuzzy expected utility function - where fuzzy utility is considered in conjunction with a possibility measure on unforeseen states. At the second step, each player must guess the simultaneous reasoning process performed by the counterpart. Maybe fallibly, each player attributes by default to the other player his own scheme or reasoning, because it seems to himself the most "normal course of facts" - since he does not know about any falsification of this scheme of reasoning. This is provided by encoding the knowledge base that players have on the game and their default rules of inference - enunciates like "normally players own such information" or "normally a player who owns such information plays strategy such and such in a game like this" - by the formulae of a formal language on which we are able to induce a possibility ordering. The ordering will represent constraints on what the players believe as the "normal course of facts", which are imposed by the default rules that extends the players' base of knowledge. Then, at the third step we may calculate each player second hypothetical choice given the reconstruction of the other player symmetrical reasoning and the ensuing new possibility assignment on the counterpart's action under any game in each state. This carries to a new best response for each of them in fuzzy expected utility terms. Iterating the procedure will not change the set of predicted choices. So that we can conclude that the default-possibilistic reasoning will stabilize in a couple of strategy choices that constitutes one of the basic games' equilibrium points. We end up by suggesting that the resulting equilibrium will be supported by what in default logic is called the extension of a given theory - which is characterised as a fixed point - obtained by iterately applying to it the set of accepted defaults, without introducing a contradiction. Is to be noted that default logic is non-monotonic, and allows for mistakes and revisions, which seems to belong to the very nature of bounded rationality.
The most evident shortcoming of the international agreements on climate actions is the compliance to their prescriptions. Can John Rawls's social contract theory help us to solve the problem? We apply the veil of ignorance decision-making setting in a sequential dictator game to study the compliance to climate change agreements and we test the model in a laboratory experiment. The veil of ignorance shows to be very powerful at inducing the subjects to converge on a sustainable intergenerational path. However, the voluntary compliance to the agreement still remains an open issue, because even small incentives to defect can undermine the compliance stability, and therefore break the whole sustainable dynamic.
