Conflicts of interest: The ethical viewpoint

Antonio Argandona

No D/552, IESE Research Papers from IESE Business School

Abstract: Conflicts of interest are a very widespread ethical problem which, precisely for that reason, deserves special attention, both from a legal viewpoint and from the point of view of ethics applied to organizations and professions. In this paper we use the conceptual framework of agency theory to explain what constitutes a conflict of interest. This enables us to identify what causes conflicts of interest and analyze the ethical criteria to be applied to them and the solutions commonly proposed. Because our processing of information, our judgments and our decision making are subject to significant unconscious and unintended biases, the emphasis in this paper is on the conditions that an agent's decision must satisfy in a conflict of interest situation in order to be ethically correct.

Keywords: agency theory; agent; conflict interest; corruption; ethics professions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2004-03-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:iesewp:d-0552

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