Decision Making & Negotiations

We explore captain-ownership and vessel performance in eighteenth-century transatlantic shipping. Although contingent compensation often aligned incentives between captains and ship owners, one difficult-to-contract hazard was threat of capture during wartime. We exploit variation across time and routes to study the relationship between capture threat and captain-ownership. Vessels were more likely to have captain-owners when undertaking wartime voyages on routes susceptible to privateers.

Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject.

This article investigates the cost and feasibility of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. The United States has stated in its Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 submission that this is its aspiration. I suggest that this goal can be reached at a net cost in the range of $37 to $135 billion/year. I assume that the goal is to be reached by extensive use of solar photovoltaic and wind energy (66 percent of generating capacity), in which case the cost of energy storage will play a key role in the overall cost.

Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject. This timely collection considers a range of ethical issues in business through the examination of anthropologically informed theory and case examples.

In this chapter, we discuss both the criticisms and benefits of advertising and address ethical concerns for anthropologists involved in the creation of advertising. We examine how ethical complexities range from the question of advertising as a necessary form of consumer-brand engagement to socially responsible advertising as a necessary form of consumer-brand engagement to socially responsible advertising, to professional ethics surrounding the objects or brands being advertised, and to the work of anthropologists in advancing advertising campaigns.

Shopping is sometimes a source of stress, leading to avoidance coping behavior by consumers. Prior research suggests that store-induced stress makes shopping an adverse experience and thus negatively affects consumers' purchase likelihood. We propose that consumers' response to shopping stress depends on their motivational orientation. The greater the in-store stress, the more likely task-oriented consumers are to abandon the trip without making purchases. However, recreation-oriented consumers will be, up to a point, less likely to end the trip.