Hedge Markets for Executives and Corporate Agency

There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it.

Download Full-text

Endowment Effects Within Corporate Agency Relationships

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.276110 ◽

2001 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Jennifer Arlen ◽

Matthew L. Spitzer ◽

Eric L. Talley

Keyword(s):

Corporate Agency ◽

Agency Relationships

Download Full-text

Corporate Agency and Corporate Wrongdoing

New Criminal Law Review An International and Interdisciplinary Journal ◽

10.1525/nclr.2013.16.2.241 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 241-260 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Tracy Isaacs

Keyword(s):

Criminal Liability ◽

Corporate Agency ◽

The Law ◽

Corporate Wrongdoing

This article presents a philosophical defense of the view that corporations are legitimate responsible agents who may be considered criminally liable under the law. When corporations engage in blameworthy, irresponsible, or criminal actions, corporations are responsible for their actions. Whether this means we should think of them as persons in any robust sense is a separate question and we should be skeptical about conflating responsible agency with personhood. The article concludes with the claim that responsible agency and personhood are conceptually distinct, and that in the end responsible agency is a sufficient basis for criminal liability.

Download Full-text