In many legal frameworks, corporate directors are selected by shareholders. Proposed legislature in the US seeks to enable employee representation on corporate boards as well. Nevertheless, current approaches to corporate board selection could result in the systematic discounting of the needs of other, unrepresented stakeholder groups beyond shareholders and employees. To investigate this issue, we envisioned a new kind of corporate director---the ---to complement shareholder-selected and employee-selected directors. We conducted an online simulation experiment where human participants were assigned to act as corporate directors, with some being told they were selected by shareholders, some by employees, and some via a “vote by a committee of scientists who study the local and global environment in question”. Results found that participants assigned as environment-selected directors exhibited balanced preferences across stakeholder groups, behavior significantly different from both shareholder-selected directors and employee-selected directors. Further results from 3000 “virtual boards of directors” suggest that boards composed solely of environment-selected directors produce more balanced benefits across all three stakeholder groups studied (shareholders, employees, and the environment) than other configurations of boards. These results suggest that it may be useful for future legislation to consider including this novel form of director, the environment-selected director, on corporate boards.

中文翻译：

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“环境选董事”：公司董事会环境代表性的互动模拟实验


在许多法律框架中，公司董事由股东选出。美国拟议的立法机构也寻求允许员工在公司董事会中拥有代表权。然而，当前的公司董事会选择方法可能会导致系统性地忽视股东和员工之外的其他无代表性的利益相关者群体的需求。为了研究这个问题，我们设想了一种新型的公司董事，以补充股东选举和员工选举的董事。我们进行了一项在线模拟实验，其中人类参与者被分配担任公司董事，其中一些被告知他们是由股东选出的，一些是由员工选出的，还有一些是通过“研究当地和全球环境的科学家委员会投票选出的”。问题”。结果发现，被指定为环境选择董事的参与者在利益相关者群体中表现出平衡的偏好，其行为与股东选择的董事和员工选择的董事显着不同。 3000 个“虚拟董事会”的进一步结果表明，与其他董事会配置相比，仅由环境选出的董事组成的董事会可以为所研究的所有三个利益相关者群体（股东、员工和环境）带来更平衡的利益。这些结果表明，未来的立法考虑将这种新颖的董事形式（环境选择的董事）纳入公司董事会可能是有用的。