Moral licensing: a culture-moderated meta-analysis

Moral licensing is a cognitive bias, which enables individuals to behave immorally without threatening their self-image of being a moral person. We investigate this phenomenon in a cross-cultural marketing context. More specifically, this paper addresses the questions (i) how big moral licensing effects typically are and (ii) which factors systematically influence the size of this effect. We approach these questions by conducting a meta-analysis and a meta-regression. Based on a random effects model, the point estimate for the generalized effect size Cohen’s d is 0.319 (SE = 0.046; N = 106). Results of a meta-regression advance theory, by showing for the first time that both cultural background and type of comparison explain a substantial amount of the total variation of the effect size of moral licensing. Marketing practitioners wishing to capitalize on moral licensing effects should therefore consider cross-cultural difference, since marketing measures building on this effect may lead to different revenues in different countries.     

Long-term unemployment,heterogeneity, and state dependence

Zusammenfassung In dieser Arbeit wird zur Erklärung individueller Wiederbeschäftigungschancen von Arbeitslosen mittels Individualdaten für österreich ein Abgangsratenmodell geschätzt, wobei unter Berücksichtigung von unbeobachteter Populationsheterogenität auf verschiedene Formen von state dependence getestet wird. Die Abgangsrate in Beschäftigung steigt mit zunehmender Arbeitslosigkeitsdauer an und hängt primär von bestimmten persönlichen Charakteristika der Arbeitslosen und der Zahl der erhaltenen Arbeitsangebote ab. Die individuellen (Wieder-)Beschäftigungschancen von Personen, die neu oder wieder in das Erwerbsleben eintreten, sind relativ gering und werden außerdem durch vergangene langfristige Arbeitslosigkeit stark reduziert.

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I thank my collegues G. Flaig and G. Licht, G. Arminger, University of Wuppertal, A. Hamerle, University of Konstanz, R. Winter-Ebmer, University of Linz, and the referees for helpful comments. Support from the Austrian Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung is gratefully acknowleged. Of course, the usual caveats apply.     

Matching Economic Development Policy to the Local Context: Must We?

This paper examines 2013 data on high-tech manufacturing employment across metropolitan statistical areas in the United States. The purpose is to discover how a broad set of social/demographic/economic variables relate to varying densities of high-tech manufacturing employment. Two questions are asked: Do social and industrial circumstances evolve together, as suggested by institutionalist theories? Is there any evidence to suggest that economic development policy is likely to be effective at creating the conditions that might invite local development of high-tech manufacturing?     

Team Over-Empowerment in Market Research: A Virtue-Based Ethics Approach

Journal of Business Ethics - Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams (i.e., teams creating negative organizational outcomes from too much empowerment) from a...     

FROM BOTTOM TO TOP: THE ENTIRE INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN GERMANY, 1992–2003

We analyze the distribution of market income in Germany in the period 1992 to 2003 on the basis of an integrated dataset that encompasses the whole spectrum of the population, from the very poor to the very rich. We find a modest increase of the Gini coefficient, a substantial drop of median income and a remarkable growth of the income share accruing to the economic elite, which we define as the richest 0.001 percent of persons in the population. While the elite mainly obtains its income from business and capital, the income share that it receives in the form of wage income has been increasing. We also show that the dramatic decline of market income in the bottom half of the distribution is very much mitigated by income transfers within private households and by governmental redistribution.     

In-class Simulations of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game

The author developed a simple computer program for the in-class simulation of the repeated prisoner's dilemma game with student-designed strategies. He describes the basic features of the software and presents two examples for the use of the program in teaching the problems of cooperation among profit-maximizing agents.     

Tractable dynamic global games and applications

We present a family of tractable dynamic global games and its applications. Agents privately learn about a fixed fundamental, and repeatedly adjust their investments while facing frictions. The game exhibits many externalities: payoffs may depend on the volume of investment, on its volatility, and on its concentration. The solution is driven by an invariance result: aggregate investment is (in a pivotal contingency) invariant to a large family of frictions. We use the invariance result to examine how frictions, including those similar to the Tobin tax, affect equilibrium. We identify conditions under which frictions discourage harmful behavior without compromising investment volume.     

Durkheim's sociology,Simiand's positive political economy and the German historical school

During the nineteenth century, French political economy eluded the historical method. In the light of such context, the way Emile Durkheim and François Simiand interpreted the contribution of the German historical school is worth considering. Following Durkheim's sociological approach, Simiand occupies center stage when it comes to examining how much this historical method has to offer to ‘positive political economy’ considered as an alternative to ‘orthodox political economy’ and to the new conception of economic history which was finding its way through the Annales' school.     

Violations of procedure invariance—The case of preference reversals in monadic and competitive product evaluations

In this paper we investigate procedure invariance as a main axiom of the theory of rational choice that stipulates that the preference between options does not depend on the underlying elicitation method. In two experimental studies, we (1) elicit subjects’ preferences between options by means of the willingness to pay (WTP) for real products in a monadic evaluation (each product is assessed separately); and (2) compare the resulting preference order with the one obtained in a competitive evaluation entailing choices between equally priced products. We detect a significant number of systematic preference reversals, meaning that subjects who value products higher in the monadic design switch to other products in the competitive choice task. Although recent marketing literature on pricing research has focused mainly on monadic designs for eliciting willingness to pay for products, our results suggest that switching to a market-like environment where product choices are usually transacted in a competitive environment might create substantial preference reversals.