Search

Materiality assessments play an important role in helping firms to select the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics to include in their sustainability report. This article presents the six main steps of materiality assessments, the methods used, and how the complexity, uncertainty, and evaluative nature of sustainability issues complicate them. This article draws two conclusions: the selected materiality perspective influences how the other steps are conducted, and assessment results should not only focus on selecting win-win scenarios, but also on "tensioned topics," which indicate material societal impact but lack a business case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The details of the research conducted to find out the consequences of voluntarily disclosing bad private information to the public, are presented. The impact of voluntary disclosure environment on disclosure cost and proprietary costs are also presented.

The argument of proprietary costs is commonly used by firms to object against proposed disclosure regulations. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the welfare consequences of disclosure in duopoly markets and to identify market settings where proprietary costs are a viable argument for firms to remain silent. We, therefore, solve the optimal disclosure strategies and distinguish two different potentially costly effects of disclosing private information: the strategic information effect and the market information effect. We identify the market settings for which a regulator prefers to impose disclosure regulation so as to maximise consumer surplus or total surplus. Regulation may be necessary because (i) the increase in welfare outweighs proprietary costs to the firms, or (ii) firms are trapped in a prisoners' dilemma. The first primarily applies to Bertrand competition with demand uncertainty and, to a lesser extent, to Cournot competition. The second applies primarily to Cournot competition and Bertrand competition with cost uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study investigated sequencing situations where no restrictions on the jobs are imposed on m parallel and identical machines. Each agent has one job that has to be processed on precisely one machine. The weighted completion time criterion is used. It will be shown that these sequencing situations give rise to a class of m-sequencing games. Furthermore, it will be proven that an m-sequencing game is balanced if and only if the corresponding m-machine game is balanced.

This paper examines profit sharing in cooperative investments where investors bundle their capital endowments to meet the capital requirements of long term investment projects. Furthermore, investors may reinvest intertemporal gains from existing projects into new projects. Focus is on stable allocation schemes as stability is necessary to sustain the long term cooperation of investors. The paper presents sufficient conditions for the existence of stable profit sharing schemes using linear programming techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]