Publications

Purchase

2009
Working Paper

The Devil Wears Prada: Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making

By: Roy Y.J. Chua and Xi Zou

Although the concept of luxury has been widely discussed in social theories and marketing research, relatively little research has directly examined the psychological consequences of exposure to luxury goods. This paper demonstrates that mere exposure to luxury goods... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Judgments; Ethics; Marketing; Behavior; Power and Influence; Luxury

2011
Working Paper

Naiveté and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts

By: Chia-Jung Tsay, Lisa L. Shu and Max Bazerman

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Negotiation; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Perspective; Trust; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage

20 Apr 2011
Research & Ideas

Blind Spots: We’re Not as Ethical as We Think

self-interest and, often, without regard for moral principles—is silent during the planning stage of a decision but typically emerges and dominates at the time of the decision. Not only will your View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

28 Apr 2021
News

Get the Message: Reduce Water Use

25 Nov 2009
Working Paper Summaries

The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making

Keywords: by Roy Y.J. Chua & Xi Zou; Consumer Products; Retail

22 Jul 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Who Pays for White-Collar Crime?

Keywords: by Paul Healy and George Serafeim

08 Aug 2011
News

Blind Spots, Bernie Madoff's and Ours

The Price of Fairness

We study resource allocation problems that involve multiple self-interested parties and a central decision maker. We introduce and study the price of fairness, which is the... View Details

January – February 2011
Article

The Price of Fairness

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vivek F. Farias and Nikolaos Trichakis

In this paper we study resource allocation problems that involve multiple self-interested parties or players and a central decision maker. We introduce and study the price of fairness, which is the relative system efficiency loss under a "fair" allocation assuming that... View Details

Keywords: Price; Fairness

2013
Article

Is It All about the Self? The Effect of Self-control Depletion on Ultimatum Game Proposers

By: Eliran Halali, Yoella Bereby-Meyer and Axel Ockenfels

In the ultimatum-game, as in many real-life social exchange situations, the selfish motive to maximize own gains conflicts with fairness preferences. In the present study we manipulated the availability of cognitive-control resources for ultimatum-game proposers to... View Details

18 Sep 2013
News

An Honest Wage: Dollars, Hours, And Ethics

February 2011
Article

When the Social Structure Overshadows Competitive Incentives: The Effects of Network Embeddedness on Joint Venture Dissolution

By: Francisco Polidoro Jr., Gautam Ahuja and Will Mitchell

The embeddedness of interfirm relationships in a social structure can engender order in new tie formation, but competitive incentives may undermine the order that firms seek to achieve and lead to tie dissolution. We examine how relational embeddedness (history of... View Details

Keywords: Social Structure; Business Enterprises; Strategic Alliances (Business); Business Networks (Research); Competition; Joint Ventures; Alliances; Social and Collaborative Networks

Purchase

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,... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Market Design; Property

Purchase

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... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Cheating; Morality; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Attitudes

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... View Details

Keywords: Spending; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Happiness; Motivation and Incentives; Welfare; Uganda; Canada

25 Aug 2009
News

An Ounce of Prevention

March – April 2010
Article

The Need for Ideological Consciousness

By: George C. Lodge

Every so often in American history a crisis comes along that requires Americans to inspect cherished assumptions and to act in a way that many find ideologically repulsive. Although our leaders insist that such actions are pragmatic-the only sensible way to deal with... View Details

Keywords: History; Leadership; Competition; Framework; Consumer Behavior; Business and Community Relations; Government and Politics; Financial Crisis; Planning; United States

October 2012
Article

Honesty Requires Time (and Lack of Justifications)

By: Shaul Shalvi, Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer

Recent research suggests that refraining from cheating in tempting situations requires self-control, which indicates that serving self-interest is an automatic tendency. However, evidence also suggests that people cheat to the extent that they can justify their... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Cognition and Thinking