文档介绍：Can socially responsible firms survive in petitive environment?
In a 1993 article, economics professor Robert Frank asks the question, "Can socially responsible firms survive in petitve environment?"1 Frank agrees with Friedman that if pany acts morally solely out of self-interest it is not acting morally. (See the reading by Friedman in Unit B2.) Where he disagrees with Friedman is over panies have an obligation to act in socially responsible ways (over and above conforming to the law and customary ethical standards).
Frank makes the important observation that repeated or iterated interactions do not always lead to cooperative solutions. He cites the example of a law firm billing a longstanding client. The client is unlikely to know if the law firm is over-billing so there remains an incentive for the law firm to cheat. That is, information asymmetry keeps the client from responding to the law firm with a "tit-for-tat" strategy (for example, threatening to take business to another law firm).
However, the central focus of Frank’s article is on one-shot interactions. According to game theory, these really would be true prisoner’s dilemmas — cooperation (silence) would be irrational and the dominant strategy would be defection (confession). Frank wants to challenge this by taking an evolutionary perspective. If one-shot cooperation is irrational, then one would expect evoluti