Egalitarian Collective Decisions as Good Corporate Governance

Value-neutral (Robbinsian) economic science cannot directly address substantive normative issues. Economics can, however, provide analytical and empirical methods that make implications and consequences of normative premises (more) transparent and thereby indirectly contribute to normative opinion formation. To this effect we translate substantive normative premises of stakeholder value approaches into operational axioms that characterize a class of collective decision mechanisms. If such implications seem less attractive to stakeholder theorists than the high-minded values from which they started in criticism of shareholder value approaches, they should come up with alternative collective decision mechanisms or a modified set of values.