Morals and markets

Science

Volumn 340, Issue 6133, 2013, Pages 707-711

  Falk, Armin ^a   Szech, Nora ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BONN   (Germany)

^b UNIVERSITY OF BAMBERG   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DECISION ANALYSIS; EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS; ETHICS; EXPERIMENTAL STUDY; MARKET SYSTEM; PHILOSOPHY; RODENT;

ARTICLE; DECISION MAKING; HUMAN; MARKET; MORALITY; MOUSE KILLING BEHAVIOR; PRIORITY JOURNAL;

EID: 84877599617     PISSN: 00368075     EISSN: 10959203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/science.1231566     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. J. Barnes, Ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1984).
2. K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Kerr, Chicago, 1904).
3. G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (Routledge, London and New York, 1990), chap. 5.
4. M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1978), chap. 7.
5. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon, Boston, 2001).
6. S. Lukes, in Worlds of Capitalism. Institutions, Economic Performance, and Governance in the Era of Globalization, M. Miller, Ed. (Routledge, London, 2005), chap. 12.
7. A. Shleifer, Am. Econ. Rev. 94, 414 (2004).
8. For an example of a new type of market, consider, e.g., Indian surrogate mothers bearing babies for U.S. families.
9. M. Sandel, in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012), p. 202.
10. S. Bowles, J. Econ. Lit. 36, 75 (1998).
11. S. Bowles, Philos. Public Aff. 39, 46 (2011).
12. J. Henrich et al., Am. Econ. Rev. 91, 73 (2001).
13. J. Henrich et al., Science 327, 1480 (2010).
14. B. Herrmann, C. Thöni, S. Gächter, Science 319, 1362 (2008).
15. J. Haidt, S. Kesebir, Morality, in Handbook of Social Psychology S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, G. Lindzey, Eds. (Wiley, Hobeken, NJ, ed. 5, 2010), chap. 22.
16. See supplementary materials for details.
17. Comparable demonstration videos showing the killing process are publicly available at laboratories conducting animal research. The video presented to subjects showed how mice are gassed.
18. This information is irrelevant for the consequences of subjects' decisions. If they choose to save their mouse, the mouse survives. If they decide to kill it, they receive money and the mouse is killed. We could have introduced another framing, informing subjects about the existence of "surplus" mice. Although this would not have changed any consequences, it may have changed the perception of the situation at hand, e.g., in line with evidence on the so-called omission-commission bias; see, e.g., (37).
19. C. R. Plott, V. L. Smith, Eds., Handbook of Experimental Economics Results (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2008), vol. 1.
20. B. Latané, J. M. Darley, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 10, 215 (1968).
21. B. Latané, S. Nida, Psychol. Bull. 89, 308 (1981).
22. U. Fischbacher, S. Gächter, E. Fehr, Econ. Lett. 71, 397 (2001).
23. R. B. Cialdini, R. R. Reno, C. A. Kallgren, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 58, 1015 (1990).
24. E. Krupka, R. A. Weber, J. Econ. Psychol. 30, 307 (2009).
25. J. Sobel, Markets and Other-Regarding Preferences (Discussion Paper, Economics Department, Univ. of California, San Diego, 2010).
26. Median and modal prices in the bilateral market are 10 euros. Of all trades, 80.7% were in the range of 9 to 11 euros. In the multilateral market, all prices were below or equal to 10 euros, with one exception of a price of 10.1 euros.
27. The average price level in the bilateral market is 4.7 euros higher than in the multilateral market (P < 0.0001, n = 468, random fixed effects regression, with clustered standard errors on session level).
28. I. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), L. Denis, Ed. (Broadview, Toronto, Canada, 2005), p. 93.
29. K. D. Vohs, N. L. Mead, M. R. Goode, Science 314, 1154 (2006).
30. A. Kay, C. Wheeler, J. Bargh, L. Ross, Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 95, 83 (2004).
31. V. Liberman, S. M. Samuels, L. Ross, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 30, 1175 (2004).
32. R. Frank, T. Gilovich, D. Regan, J. Econ. Perspect. 7, 159 (1993).
33. A. E. Roth, J. Econ. Perspect. 21, 37 (2007).
34. R. E. Lane, The Market Experience (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1991).
35. Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine all expressed the view that markets and social behavior go hand in hand (Doux-commerce Thesis); see (38).
36. K. Arrow (39) points out that markets may require high levels of "professional ethics" (p. 36) to perform complex transactions under private information.
37. M. Spranca, E. Minsk, J. Baron, J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 27, 76 (1991).
38. A. Hirschman, J. Econ. Lit. 20, 1463 (1982).
39. K. Arrow, The Limits of Organization (Norton, New York and London, 1974).