How do individual characteristics and the business environment affect the ethical judgment of entrepreneurs? We build on literatures in stakeholder and cognitive theory to examine the effects of situational complexity and novelty on an entrepreneur's ethical judgment. Our conceptual framework...

In this paper, I consider the question of whether ethical decision-making affects a person’s happiness. Using cross-country data from the World Values Survey, I find that people who agree that it is never justifiable to engage in ethically-questionable behaviors report that they are more...

In this paper we consider the question of whether middle-scale farmers, which we define as producers generating between $100,000 and $250,000 in sales annually, are better agricultural stewards than small and large-scale producers. Our study is motivated by the argument of some commentators that...

We examine whether cooperatives are characterized by greater trust than investor-owned firms. We survey 2000 Missouri corn and soybean farmers and find that trust and farmer perceptions of honesty and competence are higher in cooperatives than in investor-owned firms and that trust is a...

We examine empirically the relationship between happiness and the ethical decisions of individuals. We use data from the 1995-97 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) to test the hypothesis that the relationship between happiness and ethics is bicausal in the sense that personal ethics affects...

During the late 1990s a series of negative events occurred in the United Kingdom (UK) related to biotechnology. These events signaled potential risks associated with biotech foods and crops and were highly reported. According to the trust asymmetry hypothesis, such events ought to cause public...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which trust directly affects public support for biotechnology, particularly in applications to food production and genetic modification of crop plants. Unlike previous research in which trust is assumed to be exogenous, this paper posits that...

The rise of contract farming and vertical integration is one of the most important changes in modern agriculture. Yet the adoption and diffusion of these new forms of organization has varied widely across regions, commodities, or farm types. Transaction cost theories have done much in helping us...

If people think or expect that others are kind, ethical or fair, are they more likely to be kind, ethical and fair in their own judgments and behaviors? Answering this question is difficult because of the confluence of individual, institutional and other-regarding factors that affect ethical...

In this paper we propose a framework for assessing claims of unfairness by agricultural producers. By employing concepts from network exchange theory and considerations of power and dependency, we show that judgments about fairness can be made after considering the structure and context of the...