Cui Bono, Benefit Corporation? An Experiment Inspired by Social Enterprise Legislation in Germany and the US
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By so relying chiefly on managers' other-regarding concerns whilst leaving corporate incentive structures unaltered, how beneficial can such legislation be? This question is vital for the ongoing debate about social enterprise forms, as recently introduced in almost a dozen US states and Canada's British Columbia. We ran a behavioral experiment with a framing likened to the corporate context of Germany which – having applied social purpose standards to business corporations as early as 1937 – seems a particularly instructive example. Our results show that a stakeholder provision, as found in both Germany and the US, cannot overcome adverse material incentives. However even absent incentives we found the stakeholder norm to fall short of fostering, and even to slightly deteriorate, other-regarding behavior. Our experiment thus illustrates the paramount importance of taking into account both adverse incentives and adverse framing effects when designing institutions. We tentatively discuss potential policy implications for social enterprise legislation and the stakeholder debate.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it