CCEG Research Agenda

Promoting Conscience in Corporations: An Experimental Investigation of Opportunistic Behavior among Corporate Employees

Project Leader: Angela Hung

One of the greatest challenges in governing the modern corporation is to constrain opportunistic behavior (e.g., lying, cheating, and stealing) by corporate agents. This project will use an experimental economics approach to shed light on the circumstances under which internal sanctions (or individual conscience) are likely to deter opportunistic behavior in employees. In particular, the project will employ a social dilemma game (also called the "Take Something" game, Dawes 1980) to investigate how individual behavior is influenced by (1) instructions from authority (2) perceptions of whether others in similar circumstances choose opportunistic behavior or not; (3) magnitude of the costs to others from opportunistic behavior. The results should improve understanding of how conscience can encourage passive altruism and deter opportunistic behavior among corporate agents.