The Limits to Moral Erosion in Markets: Social Norms and the Replacement Excuse

Bartling, Bjjrn; zdemir, Yagiz

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3043728

Cited by 26 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The focal point method of norm identification can also be used to answer the question whether the punishment of unfair behavior is a social norm. One study 89 applied the method to measure whether the punishment of unfair proposers in the ultimatum game -by rejecting their offer -is a social norm.…”

Section: How Can We Identify Social Norms?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Normative foundations of human cooperation

2018

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A large literature shares the view that social norms shape human cooperation, but without a clean empirical identification of the relevant norms almost every behaviour can be rationalized as norm driven, thus rendering norms useless as an explanatory construct. This raises the question of whether social norms are indeed causal drivers of behaviour and can convincingly explain major cooperationrelated regularities. Here, we show that the norm of conditional cooperation provides such an explanation, that powerful methods for its empirical identification exist and that social norms have causal effects. Norm compliance rests on fundamental human motives ('social preferences') that also imply a willingness to punish free-riders, but normative constraints on peer punishment are important for its effectiveness and welfare properties. If given the chance, a large majority of people favour the imposition of such constraints through the migration to institutional environments that enable the normative guidance of cooperation and norm enforcement behaviours.

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Section: How Can We Identify Social Norms?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Normative foundations of human cooperation

2018

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“…Roth, Prasnikar, Okuno-Fujiwara & Zamir (1991), Prasnikar & Roth (1992), Fischbacher, Fong & Fehr (2009 study ultimatum games with proposer or responder competition, which lead to the side with competition receiving almost nothing of the endowment. Bartling &Özdemir (2017) find support for the replacement logic if and only if the selfish action is not perceived as immoral. The games used in Bartling &Özdemir (2017) abstain from a market framing, in addition the sequential nature of their game may remove the possibility to use a replacement logic argument for the last player, and for others by backward induction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Morals in multi-unit markets

Ziegler¹,

Offerman²,

Romagnoli³

2019

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

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We examine how the erosion of morals in markets depends on the market power of individual traders. Previously studied single-unit markets provide market power to individual traders by limiting the roles of two forces: (i) the replacement logic, whereby immoral trading is justified by the belief that others would trade otherwise; (ii) market selection, by which the least moral trader determines quantities. In an experiment, we compare single-unit to (more common) multi-unit markets which may activate these forces. We find that, in contrast to single-unit markets, multi-unit markets show full erosion of morals.Especially the replacement logic drives this finding. In addition, we find that (i) market experience leads to biased social learning, whereby subjects believe that others are less moral than they actually are; (ii) erosion of morals persists partially after multi-unit markets; (iii) changes in social norms are not driving these results.

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“…Other studies that demonstrate limits in the extent to which motivated reasoning and justifications facilitate egoistic behavior are van der Weele, Kulisa, Kosfeld and Friebel (2014) who find that people do not use "moral wiggle room" (see Dana, Weber and Kuang, 2007) in the context of reciprocity and Bartling and Özdemir (2017) who find that people do not employ the "replacement logic" ("if I don't do it, someone else will") in contexts with a strong social norm.…”

Section: The Pre-emptive Taking Gamementioning

confidence: 99%

On self-serving strategic beliefs

Schneider¹

2019

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

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We experimentally study settings where an individual may have an incentive to adopt negative beliefs about another's intentions in order to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study uses a game in which a player can take money from an opponent in order to prevent the opponent from subsequently causing harm. We hypothesize that players will justify taking by engaging in "strategic cynicism," convincing themselves of the opponent's ill intentions. We elicit incentivized beliefs both from players with such an incentive and from neutral third parties with no incentive to bias their beliefs. We find no difference between the two sets of beliefs, suggesting that people do not negatively bias their beliefs about a strategic opponent even when they have an incentive to do so. This result contrasts with Di Tella, et al. (2015), who argue that they provide evidence of strategic cynicism. We reconcile the discrepancy by using Di Tella, et al.'s, data, a simple model of strategic belief manipulation and a novel experiment in which we replicate Di Tella, et al.'s, experiment and also elicit the beliefs of neutral third parties. Across three experimental datasets, the results provide no evidence of negatively biased beliefs about others' intentions. However, Di Tella, et al.'s, results and our novel data indicate that those with a greater incentive to view others' intentions negatively exhibit relatively less positive beliefs than those without such incentives.

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The Limits to Moral Erosion in Markets: Social Norms and the Replacement Excuse

Cited by 26 publications

References 53 publications

Normative foundations of human cooperation

Normative foundations of human cooperation

Morals in multi-unit markets

On self-serving strategic beliefs

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