Consistent with the bidirectional perspective on parent-child relations, the current study examined children’s perceptions of agency in the context of marital conflict. A storytelling task was completed by 115 five-year-old children, tapping perceived agency. These children and their mothers and fathers completed measures of marital conflict at two time points. Consistent with clinical theory a...

The present research investigates cultural variation in grounding principles for inferring agency in order to address an important theoretical debate: does cultural diversity in agency concepts reflect an animistic overextension of (universal) folkpsychology, as many have argued, or an alternative theory of folkcommunication based on relational principles? In two experiments, mind perception me...

Traditional agency theory assumes that managers are egoistic and need incentives to act in the best interests of the firm. As such, agency theory is a key determinant of firm size, capital structure, corporate governance, and firm value. However, traditional theory ignores the fact that some people are virtuous and do not need such incentives. If some employees are selfless, diligent, and have ...

Many opponents of free-will libertarianism argue that libertarian free agency is unintelligible. The aim of my talk is to answer them by suggesting that a coherent conception of libertarian freedom is possible if (and, possibly, only if) we adopt dispositionalism as the explanatory framework of human agency. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I classify the existing explanations of human a...

This paper argues that the advent of the WWW and the principles now developing for the move ‘social machines’ has posed serious challenges to traditional social theory. In particular, it is argued that the concept of social machines and the forms of distributed agency they imply amplify ‘deep flaws’ in the underlying principles of current agency theories that make empirical work using such fram...

A structural econometric investigation of the agency theory of financial structure We estimate a structural model of financing choices in presence of managerial moral hazard, financial distress costs and taxes. In the theoretical model, firms with low cost of managerial effort, and high financial distress costs and non–debt tax shields, find it optimal to issue equity. Correspondingly the likel...

Information asymmetry among stakeholders is the cause of accounting conservatism, since it leads to the asymmetric loss function which brings in the required mechanism to protect the interest of parties with information disadvantage; Agency theory suggests that stakeholders need conservative accounting reports since conservatism will be reciprocal beneficial for all parties and management incen...

Using a new measure of shareholder inattention constructed from exogenous industry shocks to institutional investor portfolios, we find that firms with distracted shareholders are associated higher cost debt. This effect is stronger for more powerful CEOs, information asymmetry, and those operating in less competitive product markets. Further testing suggests the inattention-cost debt relation ...

We study the strategic interaction between the pricing decisions of a pharmaceutical firm and the reimbursement decisions of a government agency which grants reimbursement rights to patients for whom new drugs are most cost-effective. If the reimbursement decision precedes pricing, the agency only reimburses some patients if the drug's private and public health benefits diverge. This is, there ...