To explore the effect of business and legal studies on the resolution of trade-offs between efficiency considerations and fairness concerns, we distributed a survey with three decision cases to freshman and senior business and law students. Our results show that business students, in direct comparison with subjects who study law, make decisions more in accordance with economic theory. Studying business administration leads to decisions that are based more on efficiency criteria, while legal education appears to lead individuals making decisions that are more based on social criteria. Our findings reveal the impact of self-selection and socialization effects on decision making. For business ethics education, this result matters because moral decision making can be influenced during studies.

We analyse the socialization effects of a university education on decision making in a public-sector context with a Weberian tradition. The results of our vignette study of 331 law and business students and 155 professionals in German public administrations show that business students-in contrast to law studentsmake decisions significantly more in line with private-sector logic. This phenomenon is not observed for professionals. Individuals' transformations from student to professional status appear to be affected by particularly strong internal and external pressures to socialize, which widely neutralizes the differences between legal and business professionals.