Search Results for “bias”

Compliance & ethics officers in the realm of bias

Bias and conflicts of interest are, of course, related to each other;  but they also differ, in that the former can be based purely on thoughts (or feelings or beliefs) whereas the latter generally requires something truly tangible, such as an economic or familial relationship. Prior postings on bias – […]

Specialty bias

A recurring theme in Doonesbury during the presidency of George W. Bush was that whatever the challenge he was faced with the President would respond by cutting taxes for the wealthy. The reason was not nefarious, according to the comic strip. Cutting taxes was simply what he knew best how […]

How does your compliance and ethics program deal with “conformity bias”?

In his blog on the Ethics Unwrapped website published by the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business,  Prof. Robert Prentice reviews some important recent research on the behavioralist phenomenon of “conformity bias” – “the tendency of people to take their cues as to the proper way to think and […]

Cognitive Bias and the Need for “Behavioral Ethics and Compliance”

The Conflict of Interest Blog is focused not only on traditional COIs but also on what can be called “Conflicts’ Cousins” – other phenomena that, like COIs, can subvert sound ethical (and sometimes legal) decision making.  One of these – “moral hazard” – has been the subject of several posts to […]

“Corporate Law for Good People”

Compliance programs have long been viewed (at least by me) as a “delivery device” for bringing behavioral ethics ideas and information into the workplace. And now something similar can be said about corporate governance. In Corporate Law for Good People Yuval Feldman, Adi Libson (both of Bar-Ilan University) and Gideon […]

The 2020 behavioral ethics and compliance index

While in the more than eight years of its existence the COI Blog  has been devoted primarily to examining conflicts of interest it has also run quite a few posts on what behavioral ethics might mean for corporate compliance and ethics programs. Below is an updated version of a topical  index […]

Does compliance have a dark side?

Many years ago, the CEO of a client company told me that he wanted to fire another corporate officer there. I asked him what basis he had for this contemplated action and he said it was that the officer had failed to take mandatory compliance training. I responded by asking […]

Is ethics being short-changed by compliance?

In the beginning of this field there was ethics. But with the advent of the Sentencing Guidelines in 1991 compliance entered the picture and where there were once ethics programs now stand “compliance and ethics” ones. Has ethics been short-changed in this transition? In a recent posting in the Harvard […]

Sweating the small stuff

In Behavioral Ethics as Compliance  (Cambridge Handbook of Compliance (Van Rooij & Sokol Eds)) Yuval Feldman and Yotam Kaplan write: “[C]urrent approaches to law enforcement and compliance tend to focus on “smoking guns” and extreme violations of the law as the core case and as the ultimate manifestation of the […]

Behavioral ethics, the board and C&E officers

In Conflicts and Biases in the Boardroom, recently posted on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Frank Glassner, of Veritas identifies five ways that cognitive bias can inhibit great governance: – A board is reluctant to ask the right questions – The group is unable […]