Three laboratory studies investigated the hypothesis that the presence of wealth may influence people's propensity to engage in unethical behavior for financial gain. In the experiments, participants were given the opportunity to cheat by overstating their performance on an anagram task. In each...

This article investigates the pricing distortions that arise from the use of a common nonlinear incentive scheme at a leading enterprise software vendor. The empirical results demonstrate that salespeople are adept at gaming the timing of deal closure to take advantage of the vendor’s...

We investigate how the convexity of a firm's incentives interacts with worker overconfidence to affect sorting decisions and performance. We demonstrate, experimentally, that overconfident employees are more likely to sort into a nonlinear incentive scheme over a linear one, even though this...

We use experiments in high schools in two neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Palermo, Italy to experimentally demonstrate that the historical informal institution of organized crime can undermine current institutions, even in religiously and ethnically homogeneous populations. Using trust...

This paper argues that conflicting incentives among managers may impede potential knowledge-sharing benefits from vertical integration. I study knowledge-based agency costs from vertical integration in car leasing, where manufacturer-owned captive lessors compete with independent lessors. Both...

Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and enforcement of government...

Competition among firms can have many positive outcomes, including decreased prices and improved quality. Yet competition can have a darker side when firms can gain competitive advantage through illicit and corrupt activities. In this paper, we argue that competition can lead organizations to...

In this paper, we explore how organizations influence the unethical behavior of their employees. Using a unique data set of over three million vehicle emissions tests, we find strong evidence of ethical spillovers from firms to individuals. When inspectors work across different organizations,...

Although unethical behavior often benefits third-parties not directly complicit in the misconduct, not all beneficiaries welcome these ill-gotten benefits. We investigate whether actors consider the ethical preferences of potential beneficiaries or rely solely on their own ethical...