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When facing a significant demand or supply shock, profit-maximising firms may decide to adopt unfair economic decisions such as extreme cost-cutting or profiteering. No query has been made so far on what factors might moderate people’s negative judgment of unfair actions in the market. Across two vignette studies (N=3,200), we experimentally examine whether a company’s corporate reputation gained from their CSR activities and a company representative’s personal reputation moderate economic action fairness appraisals. We find evidence that people overwhelmingly rate unfair economic decisions as socially unacceptable. However, people are significantly less harsh in their judgment of an unfair economic decision when the company or its leader has a wholesome reputation. By contrast, we find little overall evidence that having a bad reputation significantly worsens public disapproval of an unfair economic decision. Our results highlight the importance of having a salient, good reputation in protecting firms against severe negative fairness judgments. 


Compliance with hygiene and other safety measures in the workplace was an important component of society's strategy for reducing infections at the  onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular before vaccinations were widely available. We report the results of a field trial of well-established behavioural interventions (social norms, pledging, messenger effects) we implemented to improve compliance with such measures in an occupational setting. We use daily reports of own and other's behaviour to assess the effects of these interventions and supplement these subjective (self-reported) measures with objective data on hand sanitiser usage. The behavioural interventions tested have statistically significant but quantitatively moderate effects on subjective compliance measures and minimal effects on hand sanitiser usage. All effects of our interventions are short-term in nature and dissipate shortly after implementation. Our findings thus provide at most weak support for the notion that typical behavioural interventions can help support compliance with infection prevention measures in the workplace.


Policy makers aim to respect public preferences when making trade-offs between policies, yet most estimates of the value of safety neglect individuals’ preferences over how safety is distributed. Incorporating these preferences into policy first requires measuring them. Arroyos-Calvera et al. (2019) documented that people cared most about efficiency, but that equity followed closely, and self-interest mattered too, but not enough to override preferences for efficiency and equity. Early 2020 saw the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This event would impose major changes in how people perceived and experienced risk to life, creating an opportunity to test whether safety-related preferences are stable and robust to important contextual changes. Further developing Arroyos-Calvera et al.’s methodology and re-inviting an international general population sample of participants that had taken part in pre-pandemic online surveys in 2017 and 2018, we collected an April 2020 wave of the survey and showed that overall preferences for efficiency, equity and self-interest were remarkably stable before and after the pandemic outbreak. We hope this offers policy makers reassurance that once these preferences have been elicited from a representative sample of the population, they need not be re-estimated after important contextual changes.


Policy makers try to take account of public preferences when making trade-offs between policy options. Yet most estimates of the value of health and safety reflect only individuals’ self-interested preferences, neglecting their preferences over the distribution of public resources. We conduct an experiment in which participants choose between policy options that differ in their efficiency (expected number of fatalities or cases of ill health they would prevent) and their equity (defined in terms of the balance of risk reductions for different sections of the population). The policy options were framed as interventions to improve a hypothetical city’s water supply that would reduce the risk of death or ill health for people in different areas of the city to varying degrees. In order to examine whether self-interest would affect the trade-offs, we asked half of the sample about scenarios where they would personally benefit from some options. Our results suggest that efficiency is the most important single factor determining preferences between policy options, but decisions were influenced almost as much by equity as by efficiency. The effect of self-interest was smaller than that of the general concern for efficiency. We also elicited participants’ stated moral principles regarding trade-offs between equity, efficiency and self-interest, and found that their expressed principles were well-aligned with their choices. Our findings contribute to the growing evidence that distributional concerns matter when evaluating health interventions. 

Studies have shown that people who manage to avoid specific information about the consequences of their actions on others are more selfish. We distinguish between two explanations for this: preference construction and preference revelation. According to preference construction, the information we receive influences our generosity; according to preference revelation our generosity influences the information we want. Previous studies cannot test this causality, as the role of information received is confounded with that of information preferences. We unconfound this experimentally (n=1,237) with a modified dictator game having 3 conditions differing in who knew the endowment ('information state’) and whether this was determined endogenously (participants chose the information state) or exogenously (the information state was randomly assigned). We found that dictators who chose to hide information from themselves and/or recipients were less generous than those who chose for everyone to be informed. Only the preference revelation hypothesis can explain this, because generosity was entirely determined by the preferred information state rather than by the one actually assigned. Using preferences for information states, we investigate whether it is self-image, social image, or both that influence generosity. It is both: dictators who wanted to hide information from the recipient were the least generous, while those who wanted to hide information from themselves were the most generous.


This paper examines the effectiveness of social recommendations that rely on providing descriptive social information, compared to random recommendations, in terms of changing behavior. To this end, we collected choices made by Deciders under three (Study 1) or two (Study 2) recommendation-source treatments and a no-recommendation baseline. After role assignment (Decider or Receiver), Deciders were presented with 12 choice problems, each requiring them to decide between two options (A and B) that either impacted the points they could earn for themselves or the points that could be earned by themselves and/or by one or two Receivers. At the end of the experiment, points were translated into monetary earnings for one randomly selected choice problem.


The form of the Allais paradox known as the common ratio effect (CRE) is a violation of deterministic expected utility theory that has been widely replicated with monetary outcomes. Its robustness has stimulated the development of numerous alternative models of risky choice. However, much less is known about the prevalence of the CRE in decisions involving non-monetary outcomes. We conduct a controlled comparison of the CRE for money versus consumer goods. The CRE is very strong with money, but largely disappears for goods. We discuss possible ways of accounting for these results, and caution against assuming that findings from experiments involving monetary lotteries will reliably generalise to other types of consequences.