Ratings and rankings have become powerful tools in global governance, frequently used to motivate companies to be good corporate citizens. A wide range of environmental and social matters such as access to medicine, climate change, obesity and working conditions increasingly transcend national borders and escape the reach of national regulators. For such issues, who should set the rules about the responsibilities of corporations? How can corporations that are by definition designed to generate profit, be guided towards making decisions that benefit society as a whole? Afshin Mehrpouya and Rita Samiolo explore the process behind the production of these rankings.
By Afshin Mehrpouya
In this article we share testimonials from our professors about their personal experience with online education.
Major advances in complex technologies require the cooperation of a broad range of parties – a whole business ecosystem. Professors Sihem Ben Mahmoud-Jouini (HEC Paris) and Florence Charue-Duboc (Ecole Polytechnique Paris) used the case of the nascent hydrogen energy ecosystem to investigate how experimentation can not only be a natural step in the development of a business solution but also contribute to the emergence and consolidation of the ecosystem itself.
By Sihem Jouini , Florence Charue-Duboc
In the face of social, environmental, and financial disruptions, more attention is being paid to corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies, and sustainability benchmarks have multiplied. But does a firm's listing in a CSR index really matter to investors? HEC researchers investigated how important inclusion in the leading global CSR benchmark, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) World, is to investors.
By Rodolphe Durand , Luc Paugam , Hervé Stolowy
Robots are making their way into diverse fields of work but human workers often still feel unsafe working alongside them, regardless of the true levels of risk. Sangseok You (Assistant Professor at HEC Paris) and colleagues have used virtual reality to explore how humans can be made to feel safer while working with robots.
By Sangseok You
Shirish Srivastava and co-researchers report that e-government prevents corruption in national institutions and service systems. They set out to learn: what can be done to enhance this unintended benefit and further curb corruption in nations?
By Shirish Srivastava
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
Within the last 30 years, Shanghai has been through a dramatic evolution similar to the one that Paris has experienced for more than a century. This phenomenon has had a considerable impact on both life experience and the business environment. For 5 months, I conducted one-of-a-kind field research on how people in Shanghai experience what can be called “super-acceleration”. This experience, closely tied to a feeling of short-termism, can be defined as the fast expiry of trustable bearings.
Platform companies like Uber, Airbnb and eBay represent a disruptive new economic phenomenon. Research by Dane Pflueger into the accounting that underpins these new organizations identifies a form that few accountants would recognize.
By Dane Pflueger
NGOs and commercial firms often form partnerships. What is it that drives these alliances and who really benefits? Olivier Chatain and Elena Plaksenkova created a theoretical model to understand these collaborations better. They find that NGOs make trade-offs, and commercial firms are often disappointed with the outcomes.
By Olivier Chatain , Elena Plaksenkova
