Corruption and individual ethics: insights from a public procurement auction

This article proposes an auction model where two firms compete for obtaining the license for a public project and an auctioneer acting as a public official representing the political power, decides the winner of the contest. Players as firms face a social dilemma in the sense that the higher is the bribe offered, the higher would be the willingness of a pure monetary maximizer public official to give her the license. However, it implies inducing a cost of reducing all players’ payoffs as far as our model includes an endogenous externality, which depends on bribe. All players’ payoffs decrease with the bribe (and increase with higher quality). We find that the presence of bribe aversion in either the officials’ or the firms’ utility function shifts equilibrium towards more pro-social behavior. When the quality and bribe-bid strategy space is discrete, multiple equilibria emerge including more pro-social bids than would be predicted under a continuous strategy space.

Bioethics through the telescope: institutional ethics in the NHS

The article argues for a broader conception of bioethics. The principles that dominate current thinking are generally individualistic and do not represent the real world inhabited by patients, doctors, hospitals and the NHS as a whole. Rather than focus almost exclusively on the micro-end of the analytical spectrum, bioethics, and medical lawyers in particular, should take the institutional dimensions of health and health care more seriously, ie use a telescope to understand the dynamics that drive the subject, not just a microscope.

Ethics education in management accounting studies: evidence from business schools in Ghana

Management accounting in recent times, and perhaps rightly so, has begun to gain recognition as a profession separate and complimentary to financial accounting. Evidence exists to suggest that management accountants are exposed to a unique set of ethical challenges within industry and that a significant high number of management accountants have engaged in unethical practices in performing their jobs. For the accounting profession as a whole, the growing number of corporate failures has created a credibility crisis that requires a deliberate intervention to mitigate. If this is not addressed sooner, the accounting profession stands the risk of losing relevance. Scholarship on ethical issues in accounting practice have either focused mostly on financial accounting or have sought to combine ethical issues for financial and management accounting. Various arguments have been made in recent times of the need to treat ethical issues in behavioural studies as context-specific and therefore separate ethical considerations in management accounting from financial accounting. This study adopts an approach, following various literature, that effective ethics education can help practitioners deal appropriately with ethical issues at the work place, and explores students’ and faculty members’perceptions on current practices in ethics education. As expected, faculty and students differ significantly on a wide range of issues on ethics education in management accounting. Based on the insights provided from this study, appropriate recommendations have been made to improve ethics education in management accounting.

Protocol for a feasibility study of a self help cognitive behavioural therapy resource for the reduction of dental anxiety in young people

Background Childhood dental anxiety is very common, with 10–20 % of children and young people reporting high levels of dental anxiety. It is distressing and has a negative impact on the quality of life of young people and their parents as well as being associated with poor oral health. Affected individuals may develop a lifelong reliance on general anaesthetic or sedation for necessary dental treatment thus requiring the support of specialist dental services. Children and young people with dental anxiety therefore require additional clinical time and can be costly to treat in the long term. The reduction of dental anxiety through the use of effective psychological techniques is, therefore, of high importance. However, there is a lack of high-quality research investigating the impact of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approaches when applied to young people’s dental anxiety. Methods/design The first part of the study will develop a profile of dentally anxious young people using a prospective questionnaire sent to a consecutive sample of 100 young people referred to the Paediatric Dentistry Department, Charles Clifford Dental Hospital, in Sheffield. The second part will involve interviewing a purposive sample of 15–20 dental team members on their perceptions of a CBT self-help resource for dental anxiety, their opinions on whether they might use such a resource with patients, and their willingness to recruit participants to a future randomised controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the resource. The third part of the study will investigate the most appropriate outcome measures to include in a trial, the acceptability of the resource, and retention and completion rates of treatment with a sample of 60 dentally anxious young people using the CBT resource. Discussion This study will provide information on the profile of dentally anxious young people who could potentially be helped by a guided self-help CBT resource. It will gain the perceptions of dental care team members of guided self-help CBT for dental anxiety in young people and their willingness to recruit participants to a trial. Acceptability of the resource to participants and retention and completion rates will also be investigated to inform a future RCT.

Family-friendly employment laws (re)assessed: the potential of care ethics

In light of various reforms in recent years, this article provides a (re)assessment of the broad package of family-friendly employment rights and relevant dispute resolution procedure now available to pregnant workers and working carers. It exposes how the realities of working life for many pregnant workers and carers and the long standing desire to promote gender equality in informal care-work remain at odds with the legal framework. An argument is presented in favour of an approach that, based upon the concept of care ethics, better engages with the impact of the provisions upon crucial interdependent care relationships.

Resilience in crisis reconsidered: the need for values against relativist ethics

The need for a reconsideration of resilience from both a positive and a normative point of view can be discussed using some of the lessons and conclusions drawn from individual resilience studied by psychologists in an educational context. The main point made in this article is that unless we want to approach resilience as a feature which is exogenously given in each population and society and whose dynamics, if any, are not subject to deliberate actions and policies, we need a framework for the evaluation of resilience as a social good. Relying on the hope that resilience is necessarily built in our societies as a force guaranteeing convergence to a socially desirable point of social evolution may be too optimistic and even counterproductive, because it may lead us to an inefficient or biased political and regulatory decision making. When the effect of policies and actions at a national or international level take into account the dynamic effect of such actions on resilience itself, one cannot blindly rely on the goodness of the process any more. This is mainly because resilience is not uniformly embodied in all societies and it does not have a globally positive social value by itself. The issue of socially valuing the options available beyond market-price valuations becomes fundamental in this context.