This research investigates the link between rivalry and unethical behavior. We propose that people will be more likely to engage in unethical behavior when competing against their rivals than when competing against non-rival competitors. Across an archival study and a series of experiments, we found that rivalry was associated with increased unsportsmanlike behavior, use of deception, and willingness to employ unethical negotiation tactics. We also explored the psychological underpinnings of rivalry, which help to illuminate how rivalry differs from general competition and why it increases unethical behavior. The data reveal a serial mediation pathway whereby rivalry heightens the psychological stakes of competition (by increasing actors' contingency of self-worth and status concerns), which leads them to adopt a stronger performance approach orientation, which then increases unethical behavior. These findings highlight the importance of rivalry as a widespread, powerful, yet largely unstudied phenomenon with significant organizational implications. They also help to inform when and why unethical behavior occurs within organizations, and demonstrate that the effects of competition are dependent upon relationships and prior interactions between actors.

The emergence and sustenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for a society to thrive. Recent experimental studies have shown that cooperation increases in dynamic networks in which subjects can choose their partners. However, these studies did not vary reputational knowledge, or what subjects know about other's past actions, which has long been recognized as an important factor in supporting cooperation. They also did not give subjects access to global social knowledge, or information on who is connected to whom in the group. As a result, it remained unknown how reputational and social knowledge foster cooperative behavior in dynamic networks both independently and by complementing each other. In an experimental setting, we show that global reputational knowledge is crucial to sustaining a high level of cooperation and welfare. Cooperation is associated with the emergence of dense and clustered networks with highly cooperative hubs. Global social knowledge has no effect on the aggregate level of cooperation. A community analysis shows that the addition of global social knowledge to global reputational knowledge affects the distribution of cooperative activity: cooperators form a separate community that achieves a higher cooperation level than the community of defectors. Members of the community of cooperators achieve a higher payoff from interactions within the community than members of the less cooperative community.

We present the first empirical study to reveal the presence of implicit discrimination in a non-experimental setting. By using a large dataset of in-match data in the English Premier League, we show that white referees award significantly more yellow cards against non-white players of oppositional identity. We argue that this is the result of implicit discrimination by showing that this discriminatory behaviour: (i) increases in how rushed the referee is before making a decision, and (ii) it increases in the level of ambiguity of the decision. The variation in (i) and (ii) cannot be explained by any form of conscious discrimination such as taste-based or statistical discrimination. Moreover, we show that oppositional identity players do not differ in their behaviour from other players along several dimensions related to aggressiveness and style of play providing further evidence that this is not statistical discrimination.