To date, at least nine international banks have paid enormous sums to the US as a result of violating US economic sanctions, including the French bank BNP Paribas, which was fined nearly $9 billion in 2014. As the US increasingly employs its punitive arsenal to force non-US banks to comply, this has resulted in their Americanization, argue two HEC professors.
By David Restrepo Amariles , Matteo M Winkler
Should whistleblowers be compensated or prosecuted? In their latest research, professors from HEC Paris Nicole Stolowy and Luc Paugam, together with Lawyer Aude Londero, shed light on the different realities faced by whistleblowers depending on jurisdictions, in France and in the United-States, through numerous examples.
By Nicole Stolowy , Luc Paugam
The four giants collectively known as GAFA yield such power that it's easy for them to strike unfair deals with business partners and consumers. But a French commercial court has created a game-changing precedent by holding accountable a US-based online booking platform using the concept of significant imbalance. This has shaped a whole new doctrine which potentially brings more balance to transactions with GAFA. Explanation by David Restrepo Amariles, HEC Professor of Law.
By David Restrepo Amariles
"How to make a better society? Turn all of us citizens into lobbyists." This is the game-changing theory put forward in Alberto Alemanno’s recent book, “Lobbying for Change: Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society” (London: Iconbooks), which was launched at the Royal Society of Arts in London, then presented in New York, Melbourne, Tokyo, San Paulo, and still presented all over Europe. Interview with the author on his recent book mixing political theory, public policy and behavioural sciences, and inspired by his own public interest work.
By Alberto Alemanno
The relationship between cannabis and society is a long and deeply contested one. Throughout history, cannabis has been associated with everything from health, leisure, and pop culture to criminal and immoral behavior. But beyond the simple debate about whether cannabis is good or bad, the study of cannabis markets needs interdisciplinarity, to know what is required to construct an effective and fair contested market.
By Dane Pflueger , Daniel Martinez Ahloy
During this historical moment of transition to a more sustainable world, HEC Paris has a responsibility to help business stakeholders transform the challenges around this transition into opportunities – opportunities to maximize both economic and social value, notably by being more innovative and impactful. It is time to revisit existing organizational theories and rethink the way we teach business in terms of social utility. Find the newsletter of this Knowledge@HEC Journal here.
Commercial courts in France are overseen by peer-elected unpaid non-career judges. This judicial system has been in place for over four hundred years. In their recent study, Nicole Stolowy and Matthieu Brochier investigate how France’s commercial courts were set up and why they remain largely unchanged today. They show that France’s commercial courts are among the most efficient, with some of the lowest rates of appeal.
By Nicole Stolowy
This special issue of Knowledge@HEC highlights several research projects and teaching initiatives at HEC Paris in the context of big data and business analytics. Nowadays it does not take much to convince students or managers alike of the importance of data for businesses. As Wedel and Kannan (2016) put it, “data is the oil of the digital economy”. Indeed, data is completely transforming organizations, and data-driven decision making is becoming more and more a part of a company’s core. In an increasing digital world, all of us are walking data generators, leaving long data trails: we have more data on everything.
By Ludovic Stourm , Peter Ebbes
Lobbying is something that only cooperations do, it’s about voicing, and influencing decision makers to make decisions that might go to the interest of the few rather than the many.
In everyday technologies, learning algorithms are becoming ubiquitous. They are even changing the way laws and regulations are produced and enforced, with law increasingly determined by data and enforced automatically. In his study, David Restrepo Amariles investigates how learning algorithms are developing SMART Law to improve the quality of regulations and their enforcement, and how this can be achieved without infringing on our civil liberties and the rule of law.
