The role of law and ethics in developing business management as a profession

Currently, business management is far from being recognised as a profession. This paper suggests that a professional spirit should be developed which could function as a filter of commercial reasoning. Broadly, management will not be organised within the framework of a well-established profession unless formal knowledge, licensing, professional autonomy and professional codes of conduct are developed sufficiently. In developing business management as a profession, law may play a key role. Where the idea is that business management should be more professsionalised, managers must show that they are willing to adopt ethical values, while arriving at business decisions. The paper argues that ethics cannot survive without legal regulation, which, in turn, will not be supported by law unless lawyers can find alternative solutions to the large mechanisms of the official society, secured by the monopolised coercion of the nation state. From a micro perspective of law and business ethics, communities can be developed with their own conventions, rules and standards that are generated and sanctioned within the boundaries of the communities themselves.

On axiomatizations of the Shapley value for assignment games

We consider the problem of axiomatizing the Shapley value on the class of assignment games. We first show that several axiomatizations of the Shapley value on the class of all TU-games do not characterize this solution on the class of assignment games by providing alternative solutions that satisfy these axioms. However, when considering an assignment game as a communication graph game where the game is simply the assignment game and the graph is a corresponding bipartite graph buyers are connected with sellers only, we show that Myerson's component efficiency and fairness axioms do characterize the Shapley value on the class of assignment games. Moreover, these two axioms have a natural interpretation for assignment games. Component efficiency yields submarket efficiency stating that the sum of the payoffs of all players in a submarket equals the worth of that submarket, where a submarket is a set of buyers and sellers such that all buyers in this set have zero valuation for the goods offered by the sellers outside the set, and all buyers outside the set have zero valuations for the goods offered by sellers inside the set. Fairness of the graph game solution boils down to valuation fairness stating that only changing the valuation of one particular buyer for the good offered by a particular seller changes the payoffs of this buyer and seller by the same amount.