Pricing drives three of the most important elements of firm success: revenue and profits, customer behavior and firm image. This book provides an introduction to the basic principles for thinking clearly about pricing. Unlike other marketing books on pricing, the authors use a more analytic approach and relate ideas to the basic principles of microeconomics. Rakesh Vohra and Lakshman Krishnamurthi also cover three areas in greater depth and provide more insight than may be gleaned from existing books: 1) (...) the use of auctions, 2) price discrimination and 3) pricing in a competitive environment. (shrink)

Downsizing remains a topic of great interest to both academics and practitioners. Yet, the impact of layoff decisions on perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has hardly been studied. We examine the impact of responsibility of business leaders making these layoff decisions, and characteristics of the downsizing implementation on convergence and divergence in (1) CSR perceptions, (2) victims’ perceptions of fairness, and (3) survivor commitment, in four countries. Using an experimental design, sixteen scenarios were distributed to (1) 163 managers in (...) Estonia, (2) 152 MBA students in India and 125 MBA students in France, and (3) 186 (non-traditional) undergraduate students in the USA. Results suggest that when top managers are attributed with the responsibility for downsizing, the resulting perceptions of CSR are negative. A similar pattern of results is obtained for victims’ perceptions of fairness and survivor commitment. In addition, although there are differences in effect-size based on differences in power distance, these results hold good (are similar) across the four countries, from four different society clusters. We discuss implications, limitations, and future research directions. (shrink)

In this chapter, my main aim is to explore some of the central moral critiques of international financial institutions as well as proposals to overcome the moral problems that they face.

While the vital contribution of feminist scholarship is acknowledged, it has been criticized for overly relying on the influence of society upon women’s lives. In this paper, I demonstrate the usefulness of also considering the influence of agency upon women’s lives, specifically agential reflexivity. Using the work and life histories of a group of Sri Lankan women, I use Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach to show how investigating reflexivity can provide greater insights into the subtleties associated with women’s agency in relation (...) to how they consciously organize their life journeys and react to oppression, demonstrate resistance and effect emancipation. My research reveals latent aspects of women’s agency within a postcolonial Third World social context, where an enduring patriarchal social system intersects with modernity and subjects women to complex social and occupational circumstances. This paper contributes to the field of women’s studies by showing how the morphogenetic approach can address the problem of conflationary theorizing within feminist scholarship. (shrink)

The Book Is The First Comparative And Critical Exploration Of The Chandogya Upnishad With Logical Strength Metaphysical Consistency And Enables The Discerning Reader To See And Appreciate The Prine Metaphysical Value Of The Upanishad.

This paper builds on previous studies that explore entrepreneurship from a critical realist morphogenetic perspective, and incorporates the neglected aspect of how agential reflexivity shapes entre...

What we understand by nationalism is the idea of supporting one’s country, people, culture and sovereignty of the nation. It believes in self-rule, with an objective to maintain the national unity and solidarity. It also encourages pride in national achievements and is closely linked with patriotism. One who dedicates his life to promoting the above objectives for the glory of his nation is considered as a nationalist. Swami Vivekananda who has dedicated his short, but meaningful life for the upliftment of (...) his fellow country-men and worked hard for the freedom of his motherland from political, religious, economic and cultural bondage, for which he can rightly be called an epitome of nationalism or a true nationalist. In this article, I shall focus on his dedications and contributions for his nation and human race at large and justify him to be called a true nationalist. (shrink)

Research on the `meaning of work', especially concerning the Global South, is scarce. This paper aims to reduce this scarcity by applying critical realist meta-theory to the work and life history interviews of workers in Sri Lanka. A key discovery is that finding meaning in life through work is a personal emergent power and that, as such, it explains the way that individuals consciously manoeuvre their life-journeys towards a desired end - a modus vivendi - in a dialectic which involves (...) both emergent structural change (morphogenesis) and agency. This paper also reveals that Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, based on interviews with Western individuals, cannot be transferred rigidly to the reflexivity of Global South individuals, and therefore more work on reflexivity within this context is required. This paper therefore makes a theoretical contribution to the existing meaning of work scholarship, and it extends existing understandings of the concepts of reflexivity and emergence. (shrink)

This paper makes an argument for the democratic value of distrust. It begins by analyzing distrust, since distrust is not merely the negation of trust. The account that it develops is based primarily on Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in Why We Can’t Wait. On this view, distrust is the confident belief that another individual or group of individuals or an institution will not act justly or as justice requires. It is a narrow normative account of distrust, since it concerns (...) a specific normative task. Distinctions between vertical and horizontal distrust, as well as trust and agnostic trust are also discussed. This paper argues that distrust’s democratic value lies in its ability to secure democracy by protecting political minorities from having their voices ignored. As such, distrust can be viewed as a kind of Madisonian “check and balance” that works to prevent tyranny. Distrust also works to secure democracy by forging new or alternative forms of democratic participation. The main example discussed in this paper is King’s involvement in the Birmingham Campaign during the Black Civil Rights movement in America. In this case, King and his supporters’ distrust of fellow White citizens and political institutions led to alternative forms of political expression such as non-violent protests, boycotts, and other forms of civil disobedience, all of which led to greater racial justice by working to alleviate White tyranny. (shrink)

The present education system is mainly object oriented material in nature but not subjective or spiritual. We study mainly subject viz. physic, chemistry, Biology, Computer, Applications, and Engineering etc.; which are related to the objective world, but we don’t ourselves, or the subjective world. There is story associated with a famous Greek philosopher, Socrates, who ones asked his disciples, what do you want to become in future?” One of them said that he wanted to become a lawyer, another wanted to (...) become a politician, so on and so forth. But one student told that he wanted to become a ‘man’. To become a man is very important, for unless we become a real man first, we will not be able to handle objective knowledge properly. That is why, speaking about education Swami Vivekananda said, “We must have life-building, man making, character-making assimilation of ideas”. So education must be subject-oriented. The subject orientation is an indispensable aspect of personality development. These are self-reliance, self-knowledge, self-control and self-sacrifice. A man of high personality must have the combination of super head, heart and hand. (shrink)

Despite the vast literature on Rawls's work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy. When his arguments have been discussed, they have received staunch criticism. Some critics have charged that Rawls's arguments are not deeply democratic. Others have gone further, claiming that Rawls's arguments denigrate democracy. These criticisms are unsurprising, since Rawls's arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete. In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil (...) liberties, Rawls does not say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties. -/- In this paper, I complete some of Rawls's arguments and show that he has grounds for including political liberties, particularly those of a democratic nature, in the principle of equal basic liberty. In doing so, I make some beginning steps toward illustrating the genuinely democratic nature of Rawls's arguments. Rawls believes that a few different arguments can be given for democratic institutions and that these arguments work together to support the value of democracy. In this paper, I focus on Rawls's arguments relating to self-respect. I focus on this set of arguments because they are among the strongest of Rawls's arguments for equal political liberty and its fair value. (shrink)

n this paper, I argue that political solidarity is important to justice. At its core, political solidarity is a relational concept. To be in a relation of political solidarity, is to be in a relation of connection or unity with one’s fellow citizens. I argue that fellow citizens can be said to stand in such a relation when they have attitudes of collective identification, mutual respect, mutual trust, and mutual support and loyalty toward one another. I argue that political solidarity, (...) so conceived, is an integral element of a theory of justice. I argue that there are distinctly social bases for political solidarity and that justice requires that we promote these. Furthermore, as an example of the sort of social and political arrangements that might encourage political solidarity, I discuss Canada’s response to the recent H1N1 pandemic and the failings of this response with respect to members of the Aboriginal community within Canada. I argue that ensuring that members of the Aboriginal community had equal access to the goods they needed to protect themselves against H1N1 infection would have promoted relations of political solidarity and, in turn, would have promoted justice more effectively. (shrink)

It has been widely reported that women are underrepresented in academic philosophy as faculty and students. This article investigates whether this representation may also occur in the domain of journal article publishing. Our study looked at whether women authors were underrepresented as authors in elite ethics journals — Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Journal of Moral Philosophy — between 2004-2014, relative to the proportion of women employed in academic ethics (broadly construed). We found (...) that women are indeed underrepresented overall in prestigious ethics journal publishing. Though this is not our focus, we discuss possible causes for this finding, such as top ethics journals’ tendency not to publish much feminist philosophy; the impact of women’s lesser professional status or rank within philosophy on their prospects for, and success in, journal publishing; and the review process itself, which may disadvantage or discourage women authors — perhaps especially when their gender, rank, and affiliation are known to the editor or reviewer, or if their work is explicitly feminist. We discuss possible avenues for future research on the "woman problem" in philosophy, noting how our study relates to existing research on this issue. (shrink)

Few have discussed Rawls's arguments for the value of democracy. This is because his arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty should include democratic liberties, are incomplete. Rawls says little about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties. And, at times, what he does say is unconvincing. My aim is to complete and, where they fail, to reconceive Rawls's arguments and to show that (...) a principle requiring equal political liberty and its fair value is an appropriate component of his theory of justice. (shrink)

This essay develops an account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s justification for and use of what I will call “democratic propaganda”—truthful propaganda that is aimed at promoting and fostering democratic political action by stirring readers’ emotions. I interpret King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the broader context of his work and argue that it is a piece of democratic propaganda. I give an account of what led King to support the use of democratic propaganda and why he hoped it (...) would help to overcome a central problem in the civil rights movement: the political inaction of the white moderates. King emphasizes shame in the Letter, and I argue that this concept offers us a new way of thinking about the efficacy of democratic propaganda. I close by considering the relevance of King’s approach for today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the innovativeness of King’s use of shame, I suggest it may be time for a new approach to Black politics and activism. (shrink)

Through an analysis of the moral relationship between people and place, this paper offers a new view of the wrongful character of gentrification, which is pluralistic, locating the wrong in the non-fulfillment of three place-related rights: rights to a home, rights of residency, and place-based rights to a community. By focusing on the multiple ways that people are connected to place, we offer a more complete and systematic account of place-related rights that is not only able to make sense of (...) people’s lived experiences of the harms of gentrification but is also able to address standard criticisms, which have been made of other key accounts of the wrong of gentrification. (shrink)

In December 2006, Indonesia decided to stop sending influenza virus specimens to the World Health Organization’s Global Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN). Indonesia justified its actions by claiming that they were in protest of the injustice of GISN. Its actions stimulated negotiations to improve the workings of GISN by developing and implementing a more just framework for ‘sharing influenza viruses and other benefits’. These negotiations eventually led to the adoption of a new framework for virus and benefit sharing in May 2011, (...) at the World Health Assembly meeting. In this article, we critically evaluate Indonesia’s claims about the unjustness of GISN. We show that arguments based on the values of ownership, contribution and reciprocity work together to support Indonesia’s claim that it was owed an equal share in the benefits of GISN and, in turn, that GISN was unjust because of its failure to ensure this. We also use these values to evaluate the newly agreed upon framework for virus and benefit sharing. We suggest the new framework fails to give proper consideration to the values of ownership, contribution and reciprocity and, as a result, that it is fundamentally unjust. (shrink)

L.A. Paul has recently argued that, on the standard model of rationality, individuals cannot make rational decisions about whether to have a child or not. In this paper, I show that Paul’s arguments do not plausibly demonstrate that the standard model of rationality precludes rational decisions to have a child. I argue that there are phenomenal and non-phenomenal values that can be used to determine the value that having a child will have for us and, in turn, that can be (...) used to make rational decisions about whether to have a child or not. I also argue that we can have an approximate idea of what it is like for us to have a child, even before we have a child and that, on the standard model, this is sufficient to make rational decisions to have a child. (shrink)

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a controversial criterion for allocating scarce medical treatment has been defended and incorporated into policy: the criterion of equity. Equity-included allocation schemes prioritize, to some degree, patients from marginalized or historically disadvantaged racial/ethnic groups, or patients with low socioeconomic status, for scarce treatment. The use of such criteria has been most prominently defended in two ways: (1) as reflecting a risk factor for severe COVID-19, and thus as a way of tracking medical need, (...) and (2) as a form of remedial justice, viz. a way of redressing disparities in COVID outcomes that are caused by underlying unjust social conditions. Here, we delineate and critique those arguments. We argue that not only are such arguments unconvincing but also that there are compelling moral reasons to reject the sort of equity-included allocation schemes at issue. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper is concerned with the combinator representation of numeral systems with logarithmic space complexity of symbols. The principle used is based on the lexicographic ordering of words over a finite alphabet.

[v. 1.] Vairaagya & mumukshu vyavahaara prakaranaas -- [v. 2.] Vutpaatti prakarana -- [v. 3.] Sustenance.

This essay discusses a prominent definition of universal concomitance in the Nyäya School of Classical Indian Philosophy. This définition holds that universal concomitance is equivalent to the absence of undercutting conditions. It will be shown that though this definition seems to be inadequate, there is an auxiliary condition that may be added which makes the equivalence between universal concomitance and the absence of undercutting conditions deductively correct. It will then be shown that this auxiliary condition fits well into the Nyäya (...) foundations of logic and that furthermore this auxiliary condition does not unreasonably restrict the applicability of the definition of universal concomitance as the absence of undercutting conditions. Hence, the conclusion is that this interpretation is a good candidate for how the definition of universal concomitance as the absence of undercutting conditions should be understood. (shrink)

We define an appropriate analog of the Morley rank in a totally transcendental homogeneous model with type diagram D. We show that if RM[p] = α then for some 1 ≤ n < ω the type p has n, but not n + 1, distinct D-extensions of rank α. This is surprising, because the proof of the statement in the first-order case depends heavily on compactness. We also show that types over (D,ℵ₀)-homogeneous models have multiplicity (Morley degree) 1.

This piece outlines concrete cases of benefit sharing that occur in relation to the sharing of human (biological) samples. For example, it surveys Indonesia’s decision, in 2006, to stop sharing virus samples of H5N1 (avian influenza) with the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN). It also outlines some of the ethical issues that arise in these cases.

Our aim in this article is to define the difficulties that clinical ethics services encounter when they are asked to demonstrate the value a clinical ethics service (CES) could and should have for an institution and those it serves. The topic emerged out of numerous related presentations at the Un- Conference hosted by the Cleveland Clinic in August 2018 that identified challenges of articulating the value of clinical ethics work for hospital administrators. After a review these talks, it was apparent (...) that the field of clinical ethics may be at a crisis of sorts due to increased pressure to provide explicit measures to healthcare institutions to concretely demonstrate that CESs make a valuable difference in healthcare delivery. In this article, we grapple with how to satisfy the need for demonstrable value in a field in which metrics alone may not capture the scope of clinical ethics practice. We suggest that capturing the value of a CES has been difficult because the benefits of ethics consultation may be overt or attributable to the CES, but are often hidden due to the systems-level and process-oriented nature of clinical ethics work. Part of the difficulty in demonstrating the value of CESs is capturing and conveying all of the ways the integration of a CES throughout an institution positively affects patients, families, visitors, healthcare professionals, administrators, and the institution itself. Our aim is to (1) elucidate the multifaceted value added by a CES, including value that tends to be hidden and (2) suggest how to demonstrate value to others in a way that is not simplistic or reductionistic. (shrink)

Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. Here, we demonstrate that overexpression of p25, an activator of cdk5, led to increased levels of BACE1 mRNA and protein in vitro and in vivo. A p25/cdk5 responsive region containing multiple sites for signal transducer and activator of transcription was identified in the BACE1 promoter. STAT3 interacts with the BACE1 promoter, and p25-overexpressing mice had elevated levels of pSTAT3 and BACE1, whereas cdk5-deficient mice had reduced levels. Furthermore, mice with a (...) targeted mutation in the STAT3 cdk5 responsive site had lower levels of BACE1. Increased BACE levels in p25 overexpressing mice correlated with enhanced amyloidogenic processing that could be reversed by a cdk5 inhibitor. These data demonstrate a pathway by which p25/cdk5 increases the amyloidogenic processing of APP through STAT3-mediated transcriptional control of BACE1 that could have implications for AD pathogenesis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper builds on previous studies that explore entrepreneurship from a critical realist morphogenetic perspective, and incorporates the neglected aspect of how agential reflexivity shapes entrepreneurship. Using the morphogenetic framework and its typology of reflexive modes, we analyse 78 work and life histories gathered from Sri Lanka with the aim of understanding reflexive entrepreneurial action. Our findings suggest that, while autonomous reflexives match the common understanding of entrepreneurship, i.e. that it is individualistic and wealth-driven, nevertheless the other reflexive modalities (...) also exhibit entrepreneurship. For example, communicative reflexives may demonstrate entrepreneurship in achieving their aspiration to maintain a family firm or tradition, and meta-reflexives may demonstrate entrepreneurship in order to realize their value ideals. We conclude that the morphogenetic typology of reflexivity is a reliable guide to understanding subtleties associated with entrepreneurial action and resolving the ongoing debate about whether entrepreneurship is best understood as motivated by the individual or by society. (shrink)