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- January 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Technical Note
Ethical Analysis: Honesty and Self-Interest
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Christopher Diak
Information asymmetry is pervasive in business and can often confer great advantage. This note distinguishes forms of deceptive behavior in the face of information asymmetry and aims to help students analyze their impermissibility.
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- 2021
- Article
Don't Get It or Don't Spread It: Comparing Self-interested versus Prosocial Motivations for COVID-19 Prevention Behaviors
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Erez Yoeli and David Rand
COVID-19 prevention behaviors may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from MTurk and Prolific (total n = 6,850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering prevention behavior intentions. We...
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- July–August 2018
- Article
When Technology Gets Ahead of Society
By: Tarun Khanna
New technologies can be unsettling for industry incumbents, regulators, and consumers, because norms and institutions for dealing with them don’t yet exist. Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and...
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- April 2018
- Article
Compromised Ethics in Hiring Processes? How Referrers' Power Affects Employees' Reactions to Referral Practices
By: Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Bradford Baker and F. Gino
In this paper, we explore referral-based hiring practices and show how a referrer’s power (relative to the hiring manager) influences other organizational members’ support (or lack thereof) for who is hired through perceptions of the hiring manager’s motives and...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Thanks for Nothing: Expressing Gratitude Invites Exploitation by Competitors
By: Jeremy Yip, Kelly Kiyeon Lee, Cindy Chan and Alison Wood Brooks
Previous research has revealed that expressing gratitude motivates prosocial behavior in cooperative relationships. However, expressing gratitude in competitive interactions may operate differently. Across five studies, we demonstrate that individuals interacting with...
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- Article
Selfishly Benevolent or Benevolently Selfish? When Self-interest Undermines versus Promotes Prosocial Behavior
By: Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
Existing research shows that appeals to self-interest sometimes increase and sometimes decrease prosocial behavior. We propose that this inconsistency is in part due to the framings of these appeals. Different framings generate different salient reference points,...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Self-Interest: The Economist's Straitjacket
By: Robert Simons
This paper examines contemporary economic theories that focus on the design and management of business organizations. In the first part of the paper, a taxonomy is presented that describes the different types of economists interested in this subject—market economists,...
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Keywords:
Self-interest;
Economist;
Moral Philosophers;
Regulation;
Capture;
Organization Design;
Economy Theory;
Organization Theory;
Management Theory;
Commitment;
Controls;
Governance;
Customers;
Conflict of Interests;
Business or Company Management;
Competition;
Organizational Design;
Business Education;
Agency Theory;
Economics;
Theory;
Boundaries
- 2015
- Other Unpublished Work
Do Managers Have a Role to Play in Sustaining the Institutions of Capitalism?
By: Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna
In a capitalist system based on free markets, do managers have responsibilities to the system itself? If they do, should these responsibilities shape their behavior when they engage in the political processes that structure the institutions of capitalism? The...
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- September 2013
- Article
Self-serving Altruism? The Lure of Unethical Actions That Benefit Others
By: F. Gino, S. Ayal and D. Ariely
In three experiments, we propose and find that individuals cheat more when others can benefit from their cheating and when the number of beneficiaries of wrongdoing increases. Our results indicate that people use moral flexibility to justify their self-interested...
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Keywords:
Ethics;
Cheating;
Morality;
Moral Sensibility;
Behavior;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Attitudes
- May 2013
- Article
Sweatshop Labor Is Wrong Unless the Shoes Are Cute: Cognition Can Both Hurt and Help Motivated Moral Reasoning
By: Neeru Paharia, Kathleen Vohs and Rohit Deshpandé
The present research investigated the dual role of cognition as either an enabler of moral reasoning or self-interested motivated reasoning for endorsing sweatshop labor. Experiment 1A showed motivated reasoning: participants were more likely to endorse the use of...
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- 2013
- Working Paper
Managers and Market Capitalism
By: Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna
In a capitalist system based on free markets, do managers have responsibilities to the system itself? If they do, should these responsibilities shape their behavior when they are engaging in the political process in an attempt to structure the institutions of...
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- February 7, 2013
- Other Article
Is Doing Good ‘Good Enough’?: Unleashing the Power of Self-Interest in Philanthropy
By: Josh Baron
To take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities for philanthropy to make a difference in society, we have to encourage people to think more consciously and creatively about: "What's in this for me?"
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- 2012
- Article
Does Power Corrupt or Enable?: When and Why Power Facilitates Self-interested Behavior
By: K. A. DeCelles, D.S. DeRue, J.D. Margolis and T.L. Ceranic
Does power corrupt a moral identity, or does it enable a moral identity to emerge? Drawing from the power literature, we propose that the psychological experience of power, although often associated with promoting self-interest, is associated with greater self-interest...
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- Article
Holdout in the Assembly of Complements: A Problem for Market Design
By: Scott Duke Kominers and E. Glen Weyl
Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods—such as land or dispersed spectrum—from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems,...
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- December 2011
- Article
Economics Education and Greed
By: Long Wang, Deepak Malhotra and J. Keith Murnighan
The recent financial crisis, and repeated corporate scandals, raise serious questions about whether a business school education contributes to what some have described as a culture of greed. The dominance of economic-related courses in MBA curricula led us to assess...
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- September 2011
- Article
Global Capitalism at Risk: What Are You Doing About It?
Market capitalism, a system that has proven to be a remarkable engine of wealth creation, is poised for a breakdown. That sounds dire, and it is. Increasing income inequality, migration, weaknesses in the global financial system, environmental degradation, and...
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- Article
Naivete and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts
By: Chia-Jung Tsay, Lisa L. Shu and Max H. Bazerman
A wealth of literature documents how the common failure to think about the self-interests of others contributes to suboptimal outcomes. Yet sometimes, an excess of cynicism appears to lead us to over-think the actions of others and make negative attributions about...
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- 2011
- Working Paper
Naiveté and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts
By: Chia-Jung Tsay, Lisa L. Shu and Max Bazerman
A wealth of literature documents how the common failure to think about the self-interests of others contributes to suboptimal outcomes. Yet sometimes, an excess of cynicism appears to lead us to over-think the actions of others and make negative attributions about...
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- 2010
- Chapter
Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-interested Charitable Behavior
By: L. Anik, L. B. Aknin, M. I. Norton and E. W. Dunn
While lay intuitions and pop psychology suggest that helping others leads to higher levels of happiness, the existing evidence only weakly supports this causal claim: research in psychology, economics, and neuroscience exploring the benefits of charitable giving has...
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- 2010
- Working Paper
Prosocial Spending and Well-Being: Cross-Cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal
By: Lara B. Aknin, Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh, Elizabeth W. Dunn, John F. Helliwell, Robert Biswas-Diener, Imelda Kemeza, Paul Nyende, Claire Ashton-James and Michael I. Norton
This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). Analyzing survey data from 136 countries, we show that...
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