Ethical Issues in Management Sciences

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Ethical Issues in Management Sciences

• Dr Stephen Leung
• Department of Management Sciences
• December 3, 2003

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Core Courses FB2200 FB2201

• Aim of MS I II
• is to introduce the basic concepts of management
  sciences and discuss issues arising in applying
  these concepts to make business decisions.

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Core Courses Management Sciences I II

• The objectives are
• to provide students with an understanding of
  collecting, describing, and presenting
  statistical data
• to introduce the statistical techniques of data
  analysis, including estimation, hypothesis
  testing, regression analysis and forecasting

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Why Survey? What Implications?

• Centa-City Index
• measures the changes in the prices and the pulse
  of the property market
• Consumer Satisfaction Index
• represents the satisfaction level of Hong Kong
  consumers towards the quality of most products
  sold in HK
• HK Sustainable Development Index
• is about balance between the community, business
  and government
• aimed towards economic prosperity, environmental
  quality and social vibrancy

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Honesty / Integrity

• Falsifying data
• curbstoning (or rocking-chair) interviewing
• interviewers or observers complete interviews
  themselves or make up observed respondents
  behaviors
• not follow sampling procedure
• ask friends and relatives fill out survey
• conveniently available to complete the survey
• no need to follow up on the established call-back
  procedures

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Responsibility

• Selling of unnecessary or unwarranted research
  services
• convincing that two or three forms of data
  collection methods, but only one method is
  appropriate
• perform costly data analysis that is not
  consistent with the initial research design

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Fairness

• Consciously manipulating data structures
  inappropriately
• data analysis procedures for the purpose of
  reporting a biased picture to the decision maker
• do not report selected findings at all
• research conducted by tobacco companies for 40
  years suggested that cigarette smoking was not a
  direct link to certain types of cancer

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Respect

• Create respondent abuse
• selling the respondents names and demographic
  data without their approval
• using infrared dye on questionnaires for the
  purpose of making a sales call
• using hidden tape recorders without permission

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Benevolence

• Create respondent abuse
• state that interviews are very short (in reality,
  last up to one hour)