View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Worse on Purpose
Investigative essays on corporate enshittification — how the brands you trusted made everything worse on purpose, and who profits when they do.
How Field Experiments in Economics Can Complement Psychological Research on Judgment Biases
This review summarizes results of field experiments examining individual behaviors across several market settings—from open-air markets to rideshare markets to tax-compliance markets—where people sort themselves into market roles wherein they make consequential decisions. Using three distinct examples from my own research on the endowment effect, left-digit bias, and omission bias, I showcase how field experiments can help researchers understand mediators, heterogeneity, and causal moderation involved in judgment biases in the field. In this manner, the review highlights that economic field experiments can serve an invaluable intellectual role alongside traditional laboratory research.
Affording Disposal Control: The Effect of Circular Take-Back Programs on Psychological Ownership and Valuation
A circular economy is a “closed-loop” system designed so that products flow back into the production cycle after use. With many companies implementing take-back programs as part of their sustainability strategy, a fundamental shift in consumption has occurred, with consumers considering disposal during and even before purchase decision making. Eight experiments reveal that consumers indicate a greater willingness to pay for circular program products. An increase in psychological ownership underlies the difference in product valuation. Specifically, the additional disposal control uniquely afforded by circular products increases the capacity of circular take-back program products to evoke psychological ownership. The process explanation is directly tested through mediation. Experimentally manipulating antecedents of psychological ownership (i.e., disposal control and psychological ownership) provides further support for the conceptual framework.
Compare CIRIS: Verifiable Ethical AI vs the Alternatives, With Receipts
How CIRIS's signed, on-device, checkable ethical AI stacks up against the alternatives — the safety case, with receipts.
Restoring Consumer Sovereignty: How Markets Manipulate Us and What the Law Can Do About It
Abstract. For decades, there has been broad consensus within antitrust, intellectual property, and consumer law scholarship that consumers make decisions i
Establishing Trusted Representation | CAA
Labelling of quality and price is an important key for selecting goods or services. False or misleading representations may sway consumers into buying goods or services that are actually poor quality or overvalued. The Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations prohibits such misleading representations. The Consumer Affairs Agency is addressing to ensure proper environment for shopping according to the Act.
Pain of Paying? — A Metaphor Gone Literal: Evidence from Neural and Behavioral Science
How do individuals consider the price of a good when making purchase decisions? Standard economic theories assume an analytical process: Individuals consider th
Cheating in the Lab Predicts Fraud in the Field: An Experiment in Public Transportation
We conduct an artefactual field experiment using a diversified sample of passengers of public transportation to study attitudes toward dishonesty. We find that the diversity of behavior in terms of (dis)honesty in laboratory tasks and in the field correlate. Moreover, individuals who have just been fined in the field behave more honestly in the lab than the other fare dodgers, except when context is introduced. Overall, we show that simple tests of dishonesty in the lab can predict moral firmness in life, although fraudsters who care about social image cheat less when behavior can be verified ex post by the experimenter. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2616 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Moral Incentives in Credit Card Debt Repayment: Evidence from a Field Experiment
We study the role of morality in debt repayment, using an experiment with the credit card customers of a large Islamic bank in Indonesia. In our main treatment, clients receive a text message stating that “non-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice.” This moral appeal decreases delinquency by 4.4 percentage points from a baseline of 66 percent and reduces default among customers with the highest ex ante credit risk. Additional treatments help benchmark the effects against direct financial incentives and rule out competing explanations, such as reminder effects, priming religion, and provision of new information.
Reply to Tannenbaum et al.: Constructive dialogue advancing research on civic honesty
Reply to Tannenbaum et al.: Constructive dialogue advancing research on civic honesty
You’ve Got Mail: A Randomized Field Experiment on Tax Evasion
We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15,000 taxpayers in Norway who were likely to have misreported their foreign income. By randomly manipulating a letter from the tax authorities, we cleanly identify that moral suasion and the perceived detection probability play a crucial role in shaping taxpayer behavior. The moral letter mainly works on the intensive margin, while the detection letter has a strong effect on the extensive margin. We further show that only the detection letter has long-term effects on tax compliance. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics.
Mis-Nudging Morality
Morals constrain self-serving behavior. Yet, self-regulation failures in the face of monetary temptation are common at the workplace. To limit such failures, organizations can design environments that limit the temptation to behave self-servingly, nudging workers to uphold their morals. In a series of experiments where participants may be tempted to take excessive pay after exerting effort, we study whether a simple intervention—asking individuals to state the wage they believe should be paid ex ante, before facing the temptation to take excessive compensation—prevents self-serving behavior. In contrast to lay beliefs and the predictions from prior work, we find that such an intervention is not effective, leading to self-serving behavior. However, a more realistic elicitation procedure of the appropriate wage mitigates this effect. These findings contribute to work on the malleability of moral behavior showing that simple interventions thought to effectively mitigate self-serving behavior can prompt individuals to stretch their moral boundaries. They also stress the importance of properly testing interventions that might seem intuitive. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant 766/19] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4344 .
Pivot to People: It’s Time to Build the New Economy
Today’s calls for ethical, humane, responsible, regulated and beneficial technology, compounded with venture capital’s virtue signaling in…
The Ratchet: How Preference Standards Erase What They Can't Express - Astral's Blog
Delve - Fake Compliance as a Service - Part I
How Delve managed to falsely convince hundreds of customers they were compliant and then lied about it when exposed and called out
