Introduction: Conflict of interest (COI) exists when an individual in the publication process has a competing interest that could compromise their publication process responsibility. COI is commonly associated with authors and less so with editors. Many organizations (e.g. World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)) provide resources and recommendations for addressing COIs at medical journals. However, there are no data describing journals’ utilization of these resources for editor COI policy development or adoption, and little data on the value of editor COI policies. This study aimed to understand current editor COI practices and editors’ perceptions of COI policies, along with barriers to their implementation. Methods: An online survey developed in LimeSurveyTM was distributed to editorial board members of oncology and health care sciences and services journals to measure respondents’ attitudes about COI definitions and features and COI policy experience; barriers to implementing editor COI policies; and editors’ perceptions of COI policies. Frequency analysis of survey data was conducted. Free-text responses were summarized. Results: Response rate was 20.2% (66/327), and comprised complete and partial survey respondents. The majority of respondents were editors-in-chief. Overall, respondents agreed that defined WAME COI domains were important components of an editor COI policy. Nearly 50% of respondents belonged to journals with existing editor COI policies, which they continued to use. Nearly 25% were unaware of the current editor COI policy status at their journal. Few implementation barriers were identified, the most common being challenges with verification of disclosures. Overall, respondents did not report strong attitudes in favour of or against editor COI policies, but respondents agreed that journals with an editor COI policy were more credible and trustworthy. Conclusion: This study shows that editor COI policy development and utilization is not a universal standard of practice and suggests that recognition of the value of an editor COI policy may not be widespread among editorial board members. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Conflict of interest (COI) can play an important role in the stages of getting research published. However, COI of journal editors has not been studied. The aim of this study was to find whether COI policies for editors exist and to probe editors’ perceptions about the policies. The study found that editors believe COI policies are important but for the most part, whether a journal has an editor policy or not, does not affect their perception of the journal’s validity, quality, and transparency. This study also suggests there are few barriers to implementing an editor COI policy. Additional research is needed to demonstrate the role COI plays in the research enterprise with regard to research integrity, and journal credibility and trustworthiness.

This dissertation creates a typology of conflict of interest laws, rules and policies implemented and practiced in all 50 state legislatures. The research identifies characteristics of conflict of interest regimes and suggests relationships between these characteristics and public corruption. If finds that the political culture of a state, and the professionalism of the legislature, influence the definition of what constitutes a legislative conflict of interest, thereby sanctioning some conflict of interest regimes to engage in greater self profit of its members than other regimes.

Increasing M&A activity has during recent years shown no indication of slowing down. Contrastingly the success rate of the M&A’s are still low, accordingly an increased frequency of demergers is a likely outcome. The demerger phenomenon has yet to reach the gaze of the academic community, where little is known surrounding the subject. This study takes a qualitative approach to try to understand the underlying reasons that drive a demerger process, and the factors that determine the success of a demerger process, through the lens of M&A literature. Our findings provide indications that the planning and execution of the disintegration and communication within a demerger correlates to demerger success. Furthermore, our contributions give indications that building employee commitment is an essential driver that enhances the possibility of a successful demerger.

Recommender systems are ubiquitously used by online vendors as profitable tools to boost sales and enhance the purchase experience of their consumers. In recent literature, the value created by recommender systems are discussed extensively. In contrast, few researchers look at the negative side of the recommender systems from the viewpoint of policymakers. To fill this gap, I critically investigate the welfare impact of recommender systems (RSs) during my Ph.D. study. The main focus of my Ph.D. dissertation is analyzing whether there exists a conflict of interest between the recommendations provider and its consumers in the electronic marketplace. My dissertation is composed of three parts. In Part I, I evaluate empirically whether in the real world, the profit-driven firm will choose a recommendation mechanism that hurts or is suboptimal to its consumers. In Part II, I analyze the role of personalization technology in the RSs from a unique perspective of how personalization resembles price discrimination as a profitable tool to exploit consumer surplus. In part III, I investigate the vendor’s motivation to increase the level of personalization in two-period transactions. As the RSs are designed by the firm, and the firm’s objective is to maximize profits, the RSs might not maximize consumers’ welfare. In Part I of my thesis work, I test the existence of such a conflict of interest between the firm and its consumers. I explore this question empirically with a concrete RS created by our industry collaborator for their Video-on-Demand (VoD) system. Using a large-scale dataset (300,000 users) from a randomized experiment on the VoD platform, I simulate seven RSs based on an exponential demand model with listed movie orders and prices as key inputs, estimated from the experimental dataset. The seven simulated RSs differ by the assignments of listed orders for selected recommended movies. Specifically, assignments are chosen to maximize profits, consumer surplus, social welfare, popularity (IMDB votes and IMDB ratings), and previous sales, as well as random assignments. As a result, the profit-driven recommender system generates 8% less consumer surplus than the consumer-driven RSs, providing evidence for a conflict of interest between the vendor and its consumers. Major e-vendors personalize recommendations by different algorithms that depend on how much and types of consumer information obtained. Therefore, the welfare evaluations of personalized recommendation strategies by empirical methods are hard to generalize. In Part II of my thesis, I base my analysis of personalization in RSs on a conceptual approach. Under an analytic framework of horizontal product differentiation and heterogenous consumer preferences, the resemblance of personalization to price discrimination in welfare properties is presented. Personalization is beneficial to consumers when more personalization leads to more adoption of recommendations, since it decreases search costs for more consumers. However, when the level surpasses a threshold when all consumers adopt, a more personalized RS decreases consumer surplus and only helps the firm to exploit surplus from consumers. The extreme case of perfect personalization generates the same welfare results as first-degree price discrimination where consumers get perfectly fit recommendations but are charged their willingness-to-pay. As shown in Part II, personalization is always profitable for the monopoly seller. In Part III, I investigate the vendor’s motivation to increase the level of personalization in a two-period transactions. In the first period, consumers do not observe the true quality of the recommendations and choose to accept recommended products or not based on their initial guesses. In the second period, consumers fully learn the quality. The settings of consumer uncertainty and consumer learning incentivize the firm to charge lower-than-exploiting price for recommendations to ensure consumers’ first-period adoptions of the RS. Therefore, uncertainties mediate the conflicts of interest from the vendor’s exploitive behavior even though the vendor might strategically elevate consumers’ initial evaluation to reduce such effect.

Recent studies document that covenant violations intensify the conflicts of interest between lenders and borrowers, and lead to greater restrictions on borrowing firms’ financing and investment activities (Chava and Roberts, 2008; Roberts and Sufi, 2009b). Motivated by this literature, I investigate whether accounting conservatism, specifically conditional conservatism, mitigates the adverse consequences of debt covenant violations. I argue that conservative reporting can potentially ameliorate the conflicts of interest between lenders and borrowers. Therefore, I predict that accounting conservatism reduces the adverse impact of covenant violations on borrowers’ financing and investing activities and exhibits a positive association with operating and stock market performance after covenant violations. I obtain a sample of 312 violating and 5,327 non-violating firm-quarters observations from U.S. non-financial public firms during the period of 1998 – 2007 to test my hypotheses. Using three measures of conditional conservatism and a composite measure of the three individual measures, I find that the degree of increase in borrowing firms’ conservative reporting between loan initiation and covenant violation is associated with smaller reductions in firms’ financing and investing activities in the post-violation period. Furthermore, my analyses provide some evidence that firms that increase conservative reporting exhibit better stock market performance, implying that conservative reporting is beneficial for shareholders after covenant violations. I find no evidence that increased accounting conservatism affects operating performance after covenant violations. My results continue to hold after controlling for pre-contracting unconditional and conditional conservatism. Overall, my dissertation provides evidence that conservative accounting practices followed by borrowing firms ease the adverse consequences of debt covenant violations. My dissertation contributes to the emerging literature on the effects of accounting quality on re-contracting outcomes after covenant violations.

Credit rating agencies are controversial yet influential financial gatekeepers. Many have attributed the recent failures of credit rating agencies to conflicts of interest, such as the agencies’ issuer-pays business model and the agencies’ provision of ancillary services. This report identifies these conflicts; examines recently-finalized Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations proscribing these conflicts; and suggests other possible regulatory measures. The strategies available to regulators are diverse and differ widely in their political and administrative feasibility. These strategies include outright prohibition of conflicts; removing regulatory references to credit ratings; enhancing agency liability; organizational firewalls; performance disclosures; demonstrating due diligence and its results; increasing competition; staleness reforms; internal governance; administrative registration; and requiring alternative business models. While the report primarily focuses on how the most recent financial crisis—and the related market for asset-backed securities—highlighted conflicts of interest at credit rating agencies, this report also examines how credit ratings—and their limitations—affect sovereign debt markets. / text

Urban and regional planning, from a professional standpoint, is built on a history of preservation, with the backdrop of a perennial quest to define itself for the benefit of both laypeople and its own members. Consequently, different stages of planning throughout the twentieth century relate to simultaneous cultural changes that have caused the re-definition and re-focusing of professional efforts. From the original concentration on rational thought that coincided with the planner as objective expert with the ability to identify and promote the public interest, to the civil rights movement of the late twentieth century that embodied postmodern ideas such as advocacy, collaboration, and communication, the concept of who the planner is and what role he or she plays has developed over time. In parallel, the structures planners use to deliver their services have altered. While the shift from the traditional concept of the public sector to quasi-public and private applications has been well documented, the structures of the twenty-first century such as multinationals, public-private partnerships, and multi-disciplinary arrangements are less studied and understood. Multi-disciplinary practices (MDPs), in particular, garner little attention from the academic or professional planning spheres. While the legal and accounting professions are scrambling for a clear policy direction on cross-discipline collaboration, planners do not seem to have diverted much attention to whether or not they have a future. Indeed, the existence of MDPs provokes the return of the question of what role planners should play, and whether they should be a distinct specialized profession, or an entity with a mandate to coordinate other professions with an eye to long-term planning for the public good. This analysis attempts to qualitatively assess whether MDPs should be supported or rejected by the planning discipline, and how the profession should be addressing the answer. / Thesis (Master, Urban & Regional Planning) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-28 11:25:12.401

Recent studies document that covenant violations intensify the conflicts of interest between lenders and borrowers, and lead to greater restrictions on borrowing firms’ financing and investment activities (Chava and Roberts, 2008; Roberts and Sufi, 2009b). Motivated by this literature, I investigate whether accounting conservatism, specifically conditional conservatism, mitigates the adverse consequences of debt covenant violations. I argue that conservative reporting can potentially ameliorate the conflicts of interest between lenders and borrowers. Therefore, I predict that accounting conservatism reduces the adverse impact of covenant violations on borrowers’ financing and investing activities and exhibits a positive association with operating and stock market performance after covenant violations. I obtain a sample of 312 violating and 5,327 non-violating firm-quarters observations from U.S. non-financial public firms during the period of 1998 – 2007 to test my hypotheses. Using three measures of conditional conservatism and a composite measure of the three individual measures, I find that the degree of increase in borrowing firms’ conservative reporting between loan initiation and covenant violation is associated with smaller reductions in firms’ financing and investing activities in the post-violation period. Furthermore, my analyses provide some evidence that firms that increase conservative reporting exhibit better stock market performance, implying that conservative reporting is beneficial for shareholders after covenant violations. I find no evidence that increased accounting conservatism affects operating performance after covenant violations. My results continue to hold after controlling for pre-contracting unconditional and conditional conservatism. Overall, my dissertation provides evidence that conservative accounting practices followed by borrowing firms ease the adverse consequences of debt covenant violations. My dissertation contributes to the emerging literature on the effects of accounting quality on re-contracting outcomes after covenant violations.

Since the burst of the internet bubble there is a great deal of interest in the way investment bank prices and allocates initial public offerings (IPOs). The additional scrutiny and spotlight is also because of the dominance of bookbuilding mechanism, which gives complete discretion in terms of allocation and pricing to underwriters, and the huge amount of money left on the table by the issuers, especially during the internet bubble period. Numerous press stories and law suit by investors and issuers alleged conflicts of interest by investment banks at the expense of issuers and investors. On the basis of scoping study we identified five areas to examine conflicts of interest: laddering, spinning, relationship banking, profit sharing allocation and allocation to affiliated funds. The findings of the systematic review show that very limited research has been done on the areas identified. Moreover, there is almost no evidence available to examine the behaviour of investment banks post internet bubble burst. Likewise, very limited evidence is available from countries other than United States. From whatever limited research has been done in these areas there does seem to be enough evidence to suggest that investment banks have been involved in activities that is in conflict with their responsibilities and duties. There is clear evidence of wrong doing by investment banks in US during the internet bubble period by being involved in spinning, laddering and profit sharing allocations. There is not much evidence available at the moment to charge the underwriters of exploiting issuers and investors through the use of affiliated banks, venture capitalists and mutual funds. There is a great need to examine the behaviour of investment banks not only for the sake of the stability of the financial markets but also for the financial intermediaries themselves as unnecessary regulations undermine the efficient operations of financial markets.

Magister Legum - LLM / The common law duties have been preserved by the partial codification of the duties of directors in terms of the Companies Act of 2008 (‘2008 Act’). One such duty is the duty to disclose personal financial interest in terms of s 75 of the 2008 Act. The need for directors to disclose personal financial interest has become more necessary than ever before in South African companies, particularly State-Owned Companies (‘SOCs’), due to their role in the South African economy. The injury caused by the breach of this duty is not only to the company, but more harm is caused to the economy and the beneficiaries who are the recipients of services rendered by SOCs. There has been a plethora of media reports of poor corporate governance in SOCs which is attributed to conflict of interest due to failure of directors to disclose their personal financial interests in proposed transactions or approved agreements.