Publications

2021
Working Paper

How to Fix ESG Reporting

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna

Investors, advocacy groups, academics, and the 200 CEOs of the US Business Roundtable have asked corporations to take on an added purpose beyond a narrow pursuit of shareholder value. In response, many companies now issue ESG (Environmental, Societal, and Governance)... View Details

Keywords: ESG Reporting; Sustainability; Corporate Purpose; Greenhouse Gas; Activity-Based Costing; Environmental Sustainability; Environmental Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Measurement and Metrics; Goals and Objectives; Agreements and Arrangements; Corporate Accountability

SSRN

2021
Article

To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law

By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate... View Details

Keywords: Personalized Law; Regulation; Regulatory Avoidance; Regulatory Arbitrage; Law And Economics; Law And Technology; Law And Artificial Intelligence; Futurism; Moral Hazard; Elicitation; Signaling; Privacy; Law; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Information Technology; AI and Machine Learning

SSRN

Article

Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences

By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin

A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details

Keywords: Moral Preferences; Moral Frames; Observability; Trustworthiness; Trust Game; Trade-off Game; Moral Sensibility; Reputation; Behavior; Trust

March 2021
Article

Deliberately Prejudiced Self-driving Vehicles Elicit the Most Outrage

By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara

Should self-driving vehicles be prejudiced, e.g., deliberately harm the elderly over young children? When people make such forced-choices on the vehicle’s behalf, they exhibit systematic preferences (e.g., favor young children), yet when their options are unconstrained... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Autonomous Vehicles; Driverless Policy; Moral Outrage; Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Transportation; Policy

2021
Working Paper

Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences

By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin

A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details

Keywords: Moral Preferences; Moral Frames; Observability; Trustworthiness; Trust Game; Trade-off Game; Moral Sensibility; Reputation; Behavior; Trust

January 2021
Article

Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning Mitigates Self-Serving Bias in Resource Allocation During the COVID-19 Crisis

By: Karen Huang, Regan Bernhard, Netta Barak-Corren, Max Bazerman and Joshua D. Greene

The COVID-19 crisis has forced healthcare professionals to make tragic decisions concerning which patients to save. Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis has foregrounded the influence of self-serving bias in debates on how to allocate scarce resources. A utilitarian... View Details

Keywords: Self-serving Bias; Procedural Justice; Bioethics; COVID-19; Fairness; Health Pandemics; Resource Allocation; Decision Making

Article

If You're Going to Do Wrong, at Least Do It Right: Considering Two Moral Dilemmas at the Same Time Promotes Moral Consistency

By: Netta Barak-Corren, Chia-Jung Tsay, Fiery Cushman and Max Bazerman

We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the former and disapprove of action in the latter,... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Problems and Challenges; Conflict and Resolution

Purchase

April 2018
Article

The Power of Voice in Stimulating Morality: Eliciting Taxpayer Preferences Increases Tax Compliance

By: Cait Lamberton, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Michael I. Norton

Decisions about paying taxes represent one of the most common moral quandaries faced by citizens. In the present research, we argue that taxpayer compliance can be raised by increasing “voice”: allowing taxpayers to express non-binding preferences about the way their... View Details

Keywords: Morality; Public Policy; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Taxation; Policy; Attitudes; Governance Compliance

2014
Article

Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs

By: Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman

Ethics research developed partly in response to calls from organizations to understand and solve unethical behavior. Departing from prior work that focused mainly on examining the antecedents and consequences of dishonesty, we examine two approaches to mitigating... View Details

Keywords: Corruption; Dishonesty; Unethical Behavior; Interventions; Structure; Values; Behavior; Ethics; Moral Sensibility

2010
Book

Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism

By: Peter Wehner and Arthur C. Brooks

Popular opinion would have us believe that America's free market system is driven by greed and materialism, resulting in gross inequalities of wealth, destruction of the environment, and other social ills. Even proponents of capitalism often refer to the free market as... View Details

Keywords: Capitalism; Economic Systems; Ethics; Moral Sensibility