Are there ways that Ben & Jerrys could have simultaneously pursued their social causes and still maximized shareholder wealth?

2, What was the nature of the agency conflict for Ben & Jerrys? How were the firms managers able to defend themselves from shareholder control?

Refer this question to Ben & Jerry's Homemade reading

Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ben & Jerry's Homemade, a leading distributor of super-premium ice-cream, frozen yogurt, and sorbet, was founded in 1978 in an old gas station in Burlington, Vermont. Cohen and Greenfield recounted their company's beginnings: One day in 1977, we [Cohen and Greenfield] found ourselves sitting on the front steps of Jerry's parents' house in Merrick, Long Island, talking about what kind of business to go into. Since eating was our greatest passion, it seemed logical to start with a restaurant... We wanted to pick a product that was becoming popular in big cities and move it to a rural college town, because we wanted to live in that kind of environment. We wanted to have a lot of interaction with our customers and enjoy ourselves. And of course, we wanted a product that we liked to eat...We found an ad for a $5 ice- cream-making correspondence course offered through Penn State. Due to our extreme poverty, we decided to split one course between us, sent in our five bucks, read the material they sent back, and passed the open-book tests with flying colors. That settled it. We were going into the ice cream business. Once wed decided on an ice cream parlor, the next step was to decide where to put it. We knew college students eat a lot of ice cream; we knew they eat more of it in warm weather. Determined to make an informed decision (but lacking in technological and financial resources), we developed our own low- budget manual cross-correlation analysis." Ben sat at the kitchen table, leafing through a U.S. almanac to research towns that had the highest average temperatures. Jerry sat on the floor; reading a guide to American colleges, searching for the rural towns that had the most college kids. Then we merged or lists. When we investigated the towns that came up, wediscovered that apparently someone had already done this work ahead of us. All the warm towns that had a decent number of college kids already had homemade ice-cream parlors. So we threw out the temperature criterion and ended up in Burlington, Vermont. Burlington had a young population, a significant college population, and virtually no er, we realized the reason why there was no competition. It's so cold in Burlington for so much of the year, and the summer season is so short, it was obvious (to everyone except us) that there was no way an ice cream parlor could succeed there. Or so it seemed.2 By January 2000, Cohen and Greenfield's ice-cream operation in Burlington, Ben & Jerry's Homemade had become a major premium ice-cream producer with over 170 stores (scoop shops) across the United States and overseas, and had developed an important presence on supermarket shelves. Annual sales had grown to S237 million, and the company'seauitv was valued at $160 million (Exhibits 1 and 2). The company was known S237 million, and the company'sequity was val for such zany ice-cream flavors as Chubby Hubby, Chunky Monkey, and Bovinity Divinity. Exhibit 3 provides a selected list of flavors from its scoop-shop menu. Ben & Jerry's Social Consciousness Ben & Jerry's was also known for its emphasis on socially progressive causes and its strong commitment to the community. Although unique during the company's early years, Ben & Jerry's community orientation was no longer that uncommon. Companies such as Patagonia (clothing), Odwalla (juice), The Body Shop (body- care products), and Tom'sof Maine (personal-care products) shared similar visions of what they termed caring capitalism