The Fallacy Of The Rational Apathy Theory: Minority Shareholder Electronic Participation In Nigerian Corporate Governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: The appeal of the Rational Apathy Theory lies in the fact that it is not only a descriptive theory of shareholder behaviour in the modern public firm but also a powerful normative tool which recommends itself to corporate legislators and policymakers. True to their normative logic, proponents of apathy contend that since shareholders of modern public firms will never find it cost-efficient or incentivized to perform their monitoring responsibilities over corporate management, insisting on a shareholder-oriented corporate governance model is undesirable. This article rejects the determinism and immutability of the above thesis and argues that firm investors will embrace activism where the cost of corporate monitoring is reduced, and the benefits of doing so are increased. Given the ability of the internet to reduce monitoring costs for shareholders (predominantly minority shareholders) in public companies, the article campaigns for minority shareholder electronic participation in corporate governance and proposes a careful reform of corporate law and governance in post-covid Nigeria, drawing inspiration from similar reforms on electronic governance in Canada, UK, and the State of Delaware in the US. In a society where digitalization has been identified as a major catalyst for the economic revival of commercial and corporate life, this article recommends itself to policy and lawmakers, corporate boards, corporate law experts, legislators, regulators, and other relevant stakeholders. Methodology: The article adopts doctrinal and comparative methods of legal analysis. Results/Findings: The article finds that while the Rational Apathy Theory may have served the analogue world, it is unsuitable for a digital generation, where issues of cost, communication and participation could be liberalized, through the use of the internet, to serve the interest of shareholder democracy in public companies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".