Factors affecting perceptions of medical errors

The purpose of the study was to assess how three factors affect subjects' perceptions of a medical error made in a hypothetical scenario. The factors were (i) type of compensation system, (ii) degree of procedural “voice” present in the physician-patient relationship, and (iii) magnitude of damage sustained by the patient. Perceptions were defined to include subjects' (i) emotional reactions to the incident, (ii) causal attributions about the incident, (iii) evaluations of the faimess of the compensation systems, and (iv) compensation demands. Results indicated that damage magnitude was the only factor that affected subjects' emotional reactions to the described incident and their compensation requests. When damage was severe, subjects reacted more negatively to the event and demanded greater compensation. Subjects rated the no-fault system and greater voice conditions as more fair. In general, subjects causally analyzed the error incident in a manner that was less blameworthy of the physician when procedural justice was high, especially if this was combined with a no-fault compensation system. Results were discussed in terms of Wexler and Winick's (1991) model of therapeutic jurisprudence.     

Nonfinancial Risk Disclosure and the Costs of Private Ordering

In 2016 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) considered for the first time whether financial disclosure reform should address information on sustainability matters and other sources of nonfinancial risk. The resulting debate over these issues raised fundamental questions about how well the federal disclosure regime addresses emerging risks and about how well private ordering, through shareholder engagement, the work of private standard‐setters, and corporate voluntary disclosure, can fill the gaps. This article argues that the current model of nonfinancial risk disclosure, based largely on private ordering, is ineffective and undermines the SEC's mission to protect investors, facilitate capital formation, and promote fair, orderly, and efficient markets. This conclusion rests on evidence that the current state of sustainability disclosure is inadequate for investment analysis and that these deficiencies are largely problems of comparability and quality that cannot readily be addressed by private ordering. This article also highlights the costs of agency inaction to investors and to public companies, which have been largely ignored in the debate over the future of financial reporting. It concludes by proposing avenues for disclosure reform.     

After Oslo,a paradigm shift? Redefining ‘peoples’, sovereignty and justice in Israel-Palestine

Since the Oslo Accords, conflict resolution regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict has been guided by two conjoined premises regarding (1) the identity and rights of the two ‘peoples’ involved, and (2) Israel’s sovereignty, or lack of it, in portions of Mandate Palestine. Although seemingly incontestable, in tandem these premises have paradoxically proved ruinous to the welfare of civilians under occupation by fostering notions that peace can be achieved through geographic partition to serve rival ethno-national projects for self-determination. Proposed here is that this approach is fundamentally flawed in accepting as legitimate the Jewish-settler ideology that ethnically dismembered the ‘Palestinian people’, as well as a form of Palestinian-Arab ethno-nationalism that has also become anachronistic in light of contemporary law and norms. Drawing on comparative politics regarding the construction of ‘peoples’ and constructivist international relations theory regarding sovereignty, this article proposes that these premises must therefore be reassessed and principles of collective rights be reinterpreted to suit the current condition of advanced settler colonialism in Mandate Palestine, which compels full political unification.     

Corruption as a Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self‐fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large‐scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self‐fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.