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This paper examines the underexplored area of vicarious relative-led family mediation, wherein mediation is facilitated by a third party assuming a relative role, Laoniangjiu, analyzing how disputants use persuasive attacks to increase mediators' perceived responsibility and how mediators, often perceived as biased in Chinese culture, enact conditionally appropriate responses. By analyzing 30 episodes of a family mediation reality TV show, we find that disputants use three main persuasive tactics: attacking (in)actions, attacking consequences, and attacking character. These tactics can successfully attract mediators to their side. However, mediators also consciously avoid showing favoritism by strategically employing biased tactics like 'balancing' and 'minimization'. This behavior may stem from shifts in individuals' sense of responsibility, influenced by contemporary educational initiatives in China. This study offers insights into relative-led family mediation and highlights disputants' active role in the mediation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislation and regulation have been effective in reducing the gender wage gap in developed countries; however, the gap still exists globally, and progress towards narrowing the gap has been unacceptably slow even in regions where it is improving. This study presents the analysis of gender wage gap in Kenya's urban labor market by using the World Bank Skills Towards Employability and Productivity Survey (WBSTEPS). This study employed Mincer earnings regressions with Heckman selection correction and the Blinder-Oaxaca and Neumark decomposition procedures to answer the research questions. The results of the wage determination and participation in the labor market show that there is no selectivity-bias problem. Personal characteristics such as education and age, as well as work-related characteristics, are important factors in determining earnings. The magnitude of the gender wage gap varies across the wage distribution, and the results of the wage decomposition reveal that women in urban Kenya earn 84.5-to-86% of men's earnings. The earnings gap is overwhelmingly due to differences in returns to endowments, which account for between 70% and 94.7% of the total earnings gap. Admittedly, the study found evidence of discrimination against women in the returns to endowments, but also observed pronounced favoritism towards men. However, discrimination against women is more pronounced than favoritism towards men. Addressing the gender wage gap in Kenya requires a multifaceted approach that tackles both systemic biases against women and structural barriers that hinder women from accessing equal opportunities in education, training, and career advancement and government policies that minimize favoritism towards men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective – This study examined librarians’ perceptions of tribalism/ethnicity and favouritism practices and the perceived effect on job satisfaction and service delivery in federal university libraries in Southern Nigeria. The study was aimed at observing whether or not librarians perceive that their senior library managers engage in tribalism/ethnicity and favouritism practices; discerning the extent to which they are perceived to be engaging in tribalism/ethnicity and favouritism practices; ascertaining how the perceived tribalism/ethnicity and favouritism practices can affect job satisfaction of librarians and service delivery by librarians in federal university libraries in Southern Nigeria. Methods – This study used a descriptive survey research design. The total population for this study comprised 296 librarians who were below the rank of senior library manager from 18 federal university libraries in the southern region of Nigeria. A structured questionnaire was used for data collection. The data collected for this study were analyzed using simple percentage/frequency counts and weighted mean. Results – This study found that librarians in university libraries in Southern Nigeria believe that senior library managers engage in tribalism/ethnicity and favouritism practices and that the extent of these practices is very high. These librarians clearly have strong concerns that the practise of tribalism/ethnicity and favouritism in libraries can have negative effects on librarians’ job satisfaction and can lead to poor service delivery. Conclusion – It is glaring from this study that tribalism and favouritism practices by senior library managers are perceived to be prevalent in university libraries in Southern Nigeria, significantly impacting librarians' job satisfaction. This negative workplace dynamic can hinder effective service delivery, ultimately affecting user experience and the library's role in education. Addressing these biases is crucial, as promoting fairness and inclusivity can enhance job satisfaction, improve staff morale, and lead to higher quality library services for all patrons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and test a more comprehensive theory of the sources and effects of workplace favoritism by drawing on a large, agency-wide sample of U.S. Federal Aviation Administration employees. We report how members of various underrepresented groups differ in their perceptions of a variety of sources of favoritism. We find that their perceptions of friendship favoritism are an important source of perception of workplace favoritism for all employees. We show that perceptions of favoritism are negatively associated with employee trust in their organizations and coworkers, commitment to their organizations, willingness to speak up, and pay satisfaction, with friendship favoritism significantly dominating over most other sources. Further, we find that team leaders, supervisors, managers, and executives, with their greater knowledge of organizational processes, report less favoritism. This and previous research provide practical guidance on how greater transparency may reduce employee perceptions of favoritism in the federal workforce while avoiding discredited formalistic constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigates attitudes toward one form of sex for resources: the so-called sugar relationships, which often involve exchanges of resources for sex and/or companionship. The present study examined associations among attitudes toward sugar relationships and relevant variables (e.g., sex, sociosexuality, gender inequality, parasitic exposure) in 69,924 participants across 87 countries. Two self-report measures of Acceptance of Sugar Relationships (ASR) developed for younger companion providers (ASR-YWMS) and older resource providers (ASR-OMWS) were translated into 37 languages. We tested cross-sex and cross-linguistic construct equivalence, cross-cultural invariance in sex differences, and the importance of the hypothetical predictors of ASR. Both measures showed adequate psychometric properties in all languages (except the Persian version of ASR-YWMS). Results partially supported our hypotheses and were consistent with previous theoretical considerations and empirical evidence on human mating. For example, at the individual level, sociosexual orientation, traditional gender roles, and pathogen prevalence were significant predictors of both ASR-YWMS and ASR-OMWS. At the country level, gender inequality and parasite stress positively predicted the ASR-YWMS. However, being a woman negatively predicted the ASR-OMWS, but positively predicted the ASR-YWMS. At country-level, ingroup favoritism and parasite stress positively predicted the ASR-OMWS. Furthermore, significant cross-subregional differences were found in the openness to sugar relationships (both ASR-YWMS and ASR-OMWS scores) across subregions. Finally, significant differences were found between ASR-YWMS and ASR-OMWS when compared in each subregion. The ASR-YWMS was significantly higher than the ASR-OMWS in all subregions, except for Northern Africa and Western Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents evidence that high-ranking public officials in the Ministry of Strategy and Finance in South Korea affect local budget allocation. Applying a regression model on a uniquely constructed panel dataset, I found that the growth rate of the per-capita National Subsidy, which is a subcomponent of the national budget susceptible to discretionary behaviors, increases approximately 7 percent in the hometowns of high-ranking bureaucrats. To validate these findings and address causality, I conducted a battery of auxiliary robustness checks, which yielded confirmatory results. This study also found that enhancing transparency in the budget allocation system can alleviate concerns about bureaucratic hometown favoritism, providing suggestive evidence of bureaucrats' rent-seeking behaviors without government transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children distribute resources to recipients differentially regarding various factors such as 'need' or 'friendship' (social closeness). The aim of this study is to examine the interaction between these two variables by presenting children with two recipients who are a friend and a stranger varying on the number of materials they need. A distribution task with four different scenarios (conditions) was applied to 25 children (Mage =62.16, 15 males) aged 4-6 years. Across scenarios of four experimental conditions, the amount of needed materials was manipulated between the friend and the stranger. The participants were asked to distribute resources to the recipients in each experimental session. Allocation of all resources to the needy recipient to eliminate the need in the expense of the friend meant 'fair' distribution; while the allocation of all resources to the friend meant 'friend-favoring'. The results showed an interaction between 'need' and 'friendship' for their roles in allocation decisions. Children favored the friend when their friend is needier than the stranger and transferred the greatest amount of resources to the needy friend. In the condition that the stranger is needier, levels of friend-favoring decrease. The results indicated that preschool children have a tendency for favoritism but this preference weakens in presence of a needier stranger. Taken together, the findings suggest that children are capable of taking the two competing factors of friendship and neediness into consideration at a time and able to adjust their allocation to meet the needs of not only friends but also strangers. Preschool children's preference to support fairness occurs together with their developing helping behavior and moral reasoning as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporary United Nations Security Council (UNSC) members receive more World Bank projects. I consider the potential for UNSC status to influence aid allocation within recipient countries. While strategically important recipients might gain greater discretion over the internal distribution of aid, no clear evidence establishes whether World Bank aid tends to succumb to political pressures within countries. I examine whether political favoritism within countries varies with UNSC status and find little evidence for a connection. While cross-national lending may follow politics, subnational allocation seems to be unrelated to international politics, which has important implications for the efficacy of Bank assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the effect of regional favoritism on the access of firms to credit. Using firm-level data on a large sample of 29,000 firms covering 47 countries, we investigate the hypothesis that firms in the birth regions of national political leaders have better access to credit. Our evidence suggests that firms located in birth regions of political leaders are less likely to be credit constrained. The effect takes place through the demand channel: firms in leader regions face fewer hurdles in applying for loans. We find no evidence, however, of preferential lending from banks to firms in leader regions. Thus, regional favoritism affects access to credit through differences in perceptions of firm managers, not deliberate changes in the allocation of resources by political leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the selection of people when unequal payoffs are inevitable, but fair procedures are feasible, as in selecting one person from several candidates for a job. We show that allocators may be influenced by their similarity with a recipient, leading to favoritism in outcomes. We study four interventions to reduce favoritism and induce fair procedures, without restricting the allocator's decisions: transparency of the allocation process; a private randomization device; allowing the allocator to delegate to a public randomization device; and allowing the allocator to avoid information about recipients. Making use of beliefs and fairness judgments, we show why some interventions work, while others do not (JEL D63, J16, J7, C92). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does coethnicity with the President affect public infrastructure provision in South Africa? Using municipallevel data for 52 district municipalities from 1996 to 2016, we find that municipalities coethnic with the President are associated with higher water infrastructure provision relative to non- coethnic municipalities. Taking into account various political considerations, results show that ethnic favouritism occurs due to ethnic altruism. Our findings remain robust to different specifications of coethnicity thresholds and are applicable to electricity infrastructure provision. Results suggest that in order to minimise ethnic favouritism, politically independent institutions should oversee the allocation of funding and provision of infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workplace friendship obligations of openness and favoritism are likely to conflict with organizational norms of discretion and neutrality. This dilemma is especially apparent for Simmelian brokers, who divide time and attention across multiple, otherwise disconnected, friendship cliques. In two samples, we found support for the core idea that the fit between the requirements of the network role and the personality of the individual facilitates trust. Simmelian brokers are trusted by their friends if they exhibit a role-appropriate diplomatic personality style involving flexibility of self-presentation (high self-monitoring) and inhibition of verbal loquaciousness (low blirtatiousness). Of course, not everyone engages in Simmelian brokerage. Some individuals experience a strongly cohesive situation—i.e., a single friendship clique within which they are embedded. For these nonbrokers, we hypothesized and found that the most appropriate trait combination likely to maintain the trust of a group of tightly bound colleagues involved a forthright, be-true-to-yourself, loquacious personality style (i.e., low self-monitoring, high blirtatiousness). In introducing a personality–network fit perspective concerning whether Simmelian brokers are trusted by their colleagues, we help reconcile discrepancies in prior literature concerning whether these brokers are paralyzed into indecision by cross-pressures. Brokers who flexibly and guardedly manage individuality facilitate interconnection across cliques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the psychological theory of place attachments, managers favor hometown workers over others. Consistent with this prediction, I find that following periods of industry distress, establishments located near CEOs' childhood homes experience fewer employment and pay reductions and are less likely to be divested relative to other firm establishments. While it is not possible to directly test whether this employment bias destroys firm value, managers only implement these policies when governance is weak, suggesting that this favoritism is suboptimal. Together, these results provide direct evidence of employee favoritism and show that idiosyncratic manager styles impact corporate employment decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do informal practices in personnel management relate to corruption? The meritbased civil service system in Puerto Rico is systematically abused for political purposes. Practices, such as the management of career employees based on their political affiliation, have become normalized. Additionally, formal features of the personnel system, such as political appointments and trust employees, have also been abused for corrupt purposes. Using the trends in public personnel administration of career and trust employees as the background, this essay analyzes two cases to understand how politicized personnel practices relate to other forms of government failure and corruption: first, the administrative and political order of erasing thousands of uninvestigated child abuse referrals before an electoral event, and second, a grand-scale corruption case involving an influential political fundraiser and multiple government agencies. While the first case illustrates some of the consequences of the political management of career employees, the second case features elite networks involving government officials and government contractors and their exploitation of public resources. This essay draws from in-depth interviews with public employees and official documents related to the selected cases. The analysis ultimately shows how political-discriminatory dynamics in personnel management-both legal and illegal-allow political parties or external elements to gain control over—and extract resources from-public employees and the bureaucracy with dire social consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biases in legal decision-making are difficult to identify as type II errors (wrongful acquittals) are hardly observable and type I errors (wrongful convictions) are only observed for the subsample of subsequently exonerated convicts. Our data on the first German soccer league allow us to classify each referee decision accurately as correct, type I error or type II error. The potential bias we are interested in is favoritism toward clubs with higher long-term status, proxied by the ranking in the all-time table at the beginning of each session and by membership. Higher status clubs benefit largely from fewer type II errors. By contrast, the actual strength of clubs has no impact on referee decisions. We find no difference in type I errors and suggest anticipation of the bias as a potential explanation for the difference. We investigate several mechanisms potentially underlying our results; including career concerns and social pressure (JEL J00, M51, D81, D83). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, the case study method was used to uncover the relationships and commonalities between polemics and cynicism in the context of educational organizations. The research study group consists of five teachers who were selected through criterion sampling. These teachers worked for public schools and they were experienced in various case studies. The data was obtained through semi-structured interview questions, subjected to descriptive analysis, coded, and brought together under various categories and themes. The results obtained show that polemicist attitudes that come to life in the leader or administrator in educational organizations cause the development of cynical tendencies in the eyes of teachers and other personnel. Considering the findings obtained in line with the opinions of the teachers who are the subject of the cases, the polemicist attitude was determined to consist of conservative, otherizing, subject, and toxic sub-themes and the cynical attitude to consist of passive, being seen as the other and criticizing sub-themes. At the same time, observations revealed that polemicist and cynical tendencies are common in the codes of seeing oneself/the other one as capable, mutual distrust, and resistant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of laboratory experiments, two types of players were created randomly. Participants of one type were selected for a group based on performance on a task, whereas participants of the other type were selected automatically without prerequisite. In the main experiment, such favoritism induced a decline in cooperation, measured as contributions in pairwise public goods games, compared to when all participants were treated equally. The reduction in cooperation was observed both for those participants who did not benefit from the favoritism and for those who did, and regardless of whether a player was matched with someone who was favored or not. In extensions of the original experiment, the main results were replicated. Furthermore, the negative effect on cooperation was shown to exist also continue when a rationale was given for the use of favoritism, but to be turned off when selection was random instead of performance-based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discrimination continues to plague society, creating stark inequities between groups. While existing work has considered the role of prejudice in perpetuating discrimination, we draw on emerging research on privilege and inequity frames to offer an overlooked, complementary explanation: Objectively discriminatory decisions that are described as favoring, compared with disfavoring, are less likely to be recognized as discrimination. We further theorize this is because favoring decisions are perceived to be motivated by positive intentions. We find support for our hypotheses across eight studies. First, using both qualitative (Studies 1a-b) and experimental approaches (Studies 2–7), across a range of discrimination contexts including race, sex, nationality, and age, we find that inequity frames affect perceptions of discrimination. Further, we find that even human resource employees are less likely to recognize discrimination when described as favoring (Study 3), in turn affecting their reporting behaviors: They are less likely to report potentially discriminatory decisions for review. Next, sampling language from U.S. Supreme Court cases, we find that people support litigation less when discrimination uses a favoring frame, versus disfavoring frame (Study 4). Then, we find that this pattern is driven by inequity frames shaping perceived intentions, rather than perceived harm (Studies 5–6). Finally, we find some evidence that inequity frames regarding a discriminatory decision committed by an organization may affect candidates' job pursuit behaviors (Study 7). This work contributes to a nascent perspective that advantaging mechanisms are critical for creating group inequity: given individuals are less likely to recognize favoritism as discriminatory, favoritism may especially contribute to the persistence of inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Football League, the premier professional organization for American football, developed a policy concerning the protocol in cases where players contract COVID-19. This policy includes elements such as collective punishment that appear, at first glance, to be morally problematic. To the contrary, the policy is indeed morally acceptable as we should not think of organizations such as the NFL in the same way we think of governments in stable nations, but rather in the same way that we think of hybrid justice systems in countries where because of histories of colonialism, the identity of citizens is divided, with tribal identities being more important than national citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a systematic analysis of how hometown ties, the most common and distinct bases for interpersonal ties to build upon in China, could influence corporate governance in Chinese corporations by focusing on its impact on CEO dismissals and corporate social responsibility. We find that hometown ties between CEOs and board chairs reduce the likelihood of CEO dismissals and that the negative relationship between firm performance and CEO dismissals is weaker for hometown-connected CEOs in locally administered state-owned enterprises, for inside CEOs, for firms located outside board chairs' hometowns, and for firms operating in regions with low social trust. Moreover, we find consistent evidence that hometown ties affect Chinese firms' engagement in corporate social responsibility. Our study highlights the important role of hometown ties in Chinese relationship-based corporate governance. It also advances a normative ethical assessment of hometown-based favoritism by highlighting its distinct dynamics and impacts on focal actors and the third parties in specific contexts of actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether rules-based allocation is an effective tool for restraining political favoritism. We exploit a policy shift in distributing state lottery revenues to Israeli municipalities from discretion-based to rules-based allocation to estimate the extent of political favoritism. By comparing the likelihood of receiving grants by two types of localities before and after a policy reform, our approach offers a complementary empirical strategy for studying political favoritism that can be used even in the absence of exogenous variation in political connections; it likewise may reveal the overall impact of multiple political interests and social affiliations on favoritism. We find that political favoritism toward Jewish (versus Arab) and affluent (versus less affluent) municipalities diminished significantly after the reform but has not yet disappeared along the ethnic dimension. Our results suggest that adopting rules-based allocation might be effective in coping with political favoritism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research broadens the scope of sponsorship research to empirically examine ambivalence as a consumer response to the increasingly popular strategy of brands engaging in the simultaneous sponsorship of rival teams (i.e., a joint sponsorship). Specifically, our research considers the effects of ambivalence and team identification on sponsorship responses across three different types of brand‐team partnerships: a joint sponsorship of two rival teams, a favored team sponsorship, and a rival team sponsorship. Our results indicate that a joint sponsorship elicits ambivalence which directly and indirectly has a negative impact on attitudes and intentions toward the sponsoring brand. Joint sponsorships were also found to diminish the well‐established link between team identification and attitudes and intentions. Our research also identified argument strength as a brand messaging strategy for mitigating some of the negative effects of simultaneously sponsoring rival properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We integrate stereotype fit and interdependence theories to propose a model that explains how and why decision makers discriminate in selection decisions. Our model suggests that decision makers draw on stereotypes about members of different social groups to infer the degree to which candidates possess the specific ability required for the task. Decision makers perceive candidates that have a greater ability required for the task as less (more) instrumental to their personal outcomes if they expect to compete (cooperate) with the candidate, and they discriminate in favor of candidates that are perceived as more instrumental to them. We tested our theory in the context of racial (Studies 1-3) and age (Study 4) discrimination in selection decisions with all-male samples and found evidence consistent with our predictions. By explaining when and why decision makers discriminate in favor of, but also against, members of their own social group, this research may help to explain the mixed support for the dominant view that decision makers exhibit favoritism toward candidates that belong to the same social group. In addition, our research demonstrates the importance of considering the largely overlooked role of interdependent relationships within the organization in order to understand discrimination in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an unbalanced panel of 539 Vietnamese districts from 2000 to 2010 and the corresponding politicians' profiles, we examine firm behaviour in response to favouritism by top‐ranking politicians towards their districts of birth. Results show that the number of firms tend to increase in the home districts of politicians after they assume office. This favouritism is particularly pronounced for private domestic firms, construction firms and rural areas. However, state‐owned firms are indifferent. We discuss the non‐response of state‐owned firms, potential mechanisms and channels behind the statistical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. federal government spends huge sums buying goods and services from outside of the public sector. Given the sums involved, strategic government purchasing can have electoral consequences. In this article, we suggest that more politicized agencies show favoritism to businesses in key electoral constituencies and to firms connected to political parties. We evaluate these claims using new data on U.S. government contracts from 2003 to 2015. We find that executive departments, particularly more politicized department‐wide offices, are the most likely to have contracts characterized by noncompetitive procedures and outcomes, indicating favoritism. Politically responsive agencies—but only those—give out more noncompetitive contracts in battleground states. We also observe greater turnover in firms receiving government contracts after a party change in the White House, but only in the more politicized agencies. We conclude that agency designs that limit appointee representation in procurement decisions reduce political favoritism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is one of the few empirical studies exploring the "dark side" of ethical leadership. Using Oplatka's Irresponsible Leadership as an unethical leadership framework, the qualitative study explores how teachers conceptualize and experience unethical administrative leadership at their respective schools in the United States. This study found that amongst the unethical practices reported, they coalesced into six themes: absenteeism, indiscreet information sharing, disregard for the dignity of persons, abuses of power, displays of favoritism, and prioritizing personal gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of favoritism at the design stage of a complex procurement auction. A community of citizens procures a project but lacks the ability to translate its preferences into operational technical specifications. This task is delegated to a public officer who may collude with one of the firms in exchange of a bribe. We investigate a simple accountability mechanism that requires justifying one aspect of the technical decision determined by the alerts of competitors (alert-based accountability [ABA]). We find that relying on competitors enables the community to deter favoritism significantly more easily than random challenges. The penalty needed to fully deter corruption is independent of the complexity of the project. It depends on the degree of differentiation within the industry. In an illustrative example, we study the patterns of favoritism when corruption occurs under ABA and compare them with the patterns in the random challenge mechanism. (JEL D73, D82, H57). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Textual harassment"--sending offensive or inappropriate text messages to coworkers-- is on the rise (Baldas, 2009; Hunton & Williams LLP, 2009; Parker-Pope, 2011). Contemporary social media technologies (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, blogs, Instagram, Foursquare) carry numerous risks associated with personal and professional connectivity, privacy, and intimacy, and these risks require a new look at policy formulation concerning the boundaries of workplace romance versus harassment in the Internet age. This article includes a review of the relevant literature on workplace romance and sexual harassment policies, and discusses evolving social media policies, legal perspectives, and privacy issues. We advocate the concept of "love contracts" to aid human resource professionals, legal experts, and romantic couples concerning the risks of social media spillover and harassment from romance in the office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social ties between mutual funds and the companies in which they invest (investees) can both facilitate information transfers and encourage favoritism. Using the investment choices of mutual funds in China, we compare investment performance of holdings in companies that are socially connected to mutual funds versus those that are not. We find that funds allocate more investment to connected investees' stocks, especially when a fund is weakly monitored. This overweighting is greater in times of poor investee performance, when the benefits of additional investment to the connected investees are high. Weakly monitored funds' preference for connected stocks hurts the returns of these funds, yielding a 6.6 percent lower annualized risk-adjusted return, relative to closely monitored funds. These results suggest that, absent sufficient monitoring, agency conflicts generated by social networks can dominate the information advantages of these networks. JEL Classifications: G10; G11; G14. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a political system characterized by strong loyalty to coethnic politicians and parties, why do some voters support a non-coethnic party? Scholars theorize that voters support coethnics in order to access patronage benefits. However, for some groups, particularly minorities, coethnics may never win power, forcing voters into a second-best choice. I examine the factors that shape that choice, and the choices that voters make. This paper shows that voters are more likely to support non-coethnic parties when such parties use direct outreach to overcome credibility concerns and when their chances of victory are high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic and kinship ties have long been viewed as potential catalysts for favoritism, and hence corruption. In experiments conducted in three countries, we recruit siblings, coethnics and strangers and vary the relationship(s) between the players of a game to observe how kin and ethnic ties influence the willingness of two players to benefit one another at the expense of a third party. We see universal sibling favoritism, but ethnic favoritism, and favoritism toward other in‐group members (friends) varies. We argue this may be driven in part by kinship institutions, since favoritism is more common in societies with denser kin networks. (JEL D9, C9, D73, J12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how recruiting managers cope with communal norms and expectations of favoritism during recruitment and selection processes. Combining insights from institutional theory and network research, we develop a communal perspective on favoritism that presents favoritism as a social expectation to be managed. We subsequently hypothesize that the communal ties between job applicants and managers affect the strategies that managers employ to cope with this expectation. We test these ideas using a factorial survey of the effects of clan ties on recruitment and selection processes in Kazakhstan. The results confirm communal ties as antecedents to the strategies managers use to cope with communal favoritism. Surprisingly, the results also show that these coping strategies are relatively decoupled from managers' recruitment decisions. The findings contribute to favoritism research by drawing attention to the mitigating work of managers in societies in which favoritism is common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the assessment of 2004 and 2005 Canadian national scholarship candidates by multidisciplinary subcommittees. First, it shows weak evidence of slight favouritism by evaluators in the same discipline as the candidate. Second, same-discipline evaluator scores predict candidates' future success (proxied by becoming a university professor 10 years later) better than do different-discipline evaluator scores from the same subcommittee, but not better than different-discipline evaluator scores when there is no same-discipline evaluator on the subcommittee. Third, aggregate scores from subcommittees without same-discipline evaluators do at least as well at predicting success as those with same-discipline evaluators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Appointing or electing professionals to be public officials is a double-edged sword. Experts can use their rich knowledge to implement reforms, but they can also favor their own profession. In this study, we compare physician-trained state health ministers to ministers of other professions in Germany during 1955–2017. German state health ministers have great power to determine hospital capacities and infrastructure. Our results show that physician-trained health ministers increase hospital capacities, capital, and funding by the statutory health insurance (SHI). This prompts hospitals to hire more physicians, but with little impact on hospital outputs. As a result, total factor productivity (TFP) growth in hospital care slows down substantially under physician-ministers. At the same time, job satisfaction of hospital doctors tends to increase. We conclude that, in particular, the medical profession benefits from medical doctors in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisan bias and hostility have increased substantially over the last few decades in the American electorate, and previous work shows that partisan strength and sorting help drive this trend. Drawing on insights from moral psychology, however, we posit that partisan moral convictions heighten affective polarization beyond the effects of partisanship, increasing partisan animosity and copartisan favoritism. Testing this theory using data from two national samples and novel measures of affective polarization in everyday life, we find that people who tend to moralize politics display more partisan bias, distance and hostility, irrespective of partisan strength. These results shed light on a different moral divide that separates the American public and raise key normative questions about moral conviction and electoral politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The objectives of this study were to parse the effect of ethnicity as a potential driver of public perception of immigrants from previous finding on the labor market competition hypothesis (e.g., Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2015). Methods: We rely on survey experiments to analyze the effect of ethnicity on attitude formation toward immigrants. In a first experiment, we test whether favoritism for high‐skilled immigrants diminishes when we add the Hispanic descriptor. In a second experiment, we examine whether public opinion toward undocumented immigrants is affected by region of origin. Results: We find that favoritism for high‐skilled immigrants drops when we add the Hispanic descriptor, but that legal status outweighs any possible anti‐Hispanic sentiment. Conclusion: Our study provides a novel setup to study the interaction between economic factors and ethnicity as drivers of attitudes toward immigration among California's voters. We find some evidence that supports our hypothesis that anti‐Hispanic sentiment drives attitude formation toward immigrants and immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we test two mechanisms through which cultural capital might affect educational performance: (a) teachers misinterpreting cultural capital as signals of academic brilliance and (b) cultural capital fostering skills in children that enhance educational performance. We analyse data from the ECLS‐K and ECLS‐K:2011 from the United States and focus on three aspects of children's cultural capital: participation in performing arts, reading interest and participation in athletics and clubs. We find that (1) none of the three aspects of cultural capital that we consider affects teachers' evaluations of children's academic skills; (2) reading interest has a direct positive effect on educational performance; and (3) the direct effect of reading interest on educational performance does not depend on schooling context. Our results provide little support for the hypothesis that cultural capital operates via signals about academic brilliance. Instead, they suggest that cultural capital fosters skills in children that enhance educational performance. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A half century after he developed it, Gordon Tullock's idea of rent seeking is more relevant than ever. Though the concept has gained widespread acceptance among academics, it has yet to make an impression on public discourse. But with favoritism, corruption, and the power of special interests in the headlines, the idea deserves broader attention. In this special issue of Public Choice we commemorate Tullock's insight. Contributors examine the making of this classic piece and its effect on economic theory, empirical analysis, and economic teaching. Original papers also develop new insights into questions of development, the control of violence, corruption, culture, equity, regulation, rent extraction, the Political Coase Theorem, and more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One might obtain special favor or avoid disfavor by winning a competitive contest, a socially wasteful process that has been studied extensively in the rent-seeking literature. But favor or disfavor might also be uncontestable. In that case it will be efficient along some dimensions but grossly inequitable. The rent-seeking literature, in focusing on contest success functions, has tended to ignore the institutional roots of uncontestable rent-creation and rent-extraction. But casual observation suggests that institutional rules and cultural norms often ensure that favor and disfavor cannot be easily contested. Understanding that observation helps to resolve the Tullock paradox and explains the evolutionary persistence of inequitable social arrangements. It also illuminates economic and philosophical tradeoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]