We introduce nudges in order to incite investors to choose Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds instead of traditional funds. We have set up two online experiments with a total of 713 US retail investors, using three types of nudges to elicit their effects on investors’ SRI investments level: making SRI the default investment, introducing a SRI explanation message, and priming ethical values by displaying shocking images. Making SRI the default option is the most efficient nudge to influence investors towards SRI. Its effect is twofold. First, around 50% of investors do not opt-out of the default allocation. Second, even investors who opt-out of the default allocation invest more in SRI than those in the control group, an effect that appears driven by anchoring. Although investors subjected to both priming and message content marginally increase their SRI investment, priming or message content in isolation appears to have a non-significant influence. For choice architects who want to steer retail investors towards SRI funds, making them the default option appears to be the most powerful nudge.

International audienceWe applied a technique borrowed from the field of bioethics to test whether justice-related factors influence laypersons’ decisions concerning business ethics. In the first experiment, participants judged the acceptability of remuneration policies and in the second that of executive bonuses. In each study, participants judged a set of 36 situations. To create the scenarios, we varied (a) retributive justice—the amount of remuneration; (b) procedural justice—the clarity of the procedure that determined the remuneration; (c) distributive justice—the extent of the distribution of bonus payments amongst employees; and (d) restorative justice—a special compensation for hazardous working conditions or accidents at work. K-means clustering of all 36 judgments revealed four different personal positions in both experiments. One group of people readily accepted all situations. The other three groups’ judgments were mainly a function of distributive justice modulated in different ways by the context determined by the other variables. Furthermore, people conceive of distributive justice as categorical: Acceptability judgments only increase if companies give bonuses to all employees. Granting bonuses to a subset (i.e. mangers or executives) does not increase acceptability. Our results are useful for policy makers and provide business ethics researchers with a novel technique

Afin de vérifier si les motivations exprimées par les investisseurs individuels pour l’investissement socialement responsable (ISR) affectent leurs investissements, un jeu de simulation a été mis en place. Une méthodologie combinant analyse quantitative et qualitative, fait apparaitre un décalage entre le dire et le faire des investisseurs. Ce décalage est interprété par recours au concept de dissonances cognitives. Des solutions permettant de limiter les perturbations du mécanisme décisionnel sont alors envisagées.

International audiencePurpose: The research shows how overall performance can help foster trust in financial institutions. While a climate of is trust amongst investors and the general public towards financial institutions is since recent turmoils on the financial markets, we believe that mutual funds adopting overall performance can help recover a climate of trust due to the implied balance between economic, social and environmental performance. More specifically, overall performance promotes values that are similar to investors’ values and could be used by responsible investment funds if they want to contribute to the restoration of trust in investment funds.Method: Using an innovative, experimental design, we test the effect of value similarity on the trust that investors have in the investment fund. This effect cannot be studied in isolation, which is why we compare it with the effects offinancial performance and ethical labelling on trust.Findings: We find that funds with similar values are perceived as more trustworthy by investors. Consequently, overall performance should be added to a fund managers toolbox if she wants to foster trust in her fund. The effect of financial performance on trust applies only when the investor has no other information regarding the fund. As for the ethical labelling of funds, it has no effect on trust. Research implications: Our findings encourage research that aims to develop acomprehensive approach of integrated overall performance focusing on financial and extra financial values. Bonnet et al. (2016) field work on socio-economic management and Naro & Travaillé (2016) work on management controllersprovide promising examples in this regard.Practical implications: Investment funds can acquire an edge by communicating on overall performance and the specific values of their target investors. Merely labeling funds as ethical is not sufficient to increase trust.Social implications: Increasing similarity in values to investors and adopting overall performance in investment funds will increase investors trust. Trust contributes to social capital and allows societies to create flexible large scale businesses needed to be competitive in a global environment.Originality: Using an innovative experimental methodology we show that the underlying factor of overall performance on trust in investment funds is valuesimilarity. We provide researchers and practitioners with insight about the underlying mechanisms of the effect of overall performance on trust