Essays in Behavioral Economics and Ethics

My dissertation examines the behavioral factors that affect the emergence of unethical behaviors and inequalities in today’s society. Using insights from behavioral economics and experimental methods, I investigate the drivers of phenomena such as corruption, dishonesty, ethnic-discrimination, and gender-based differences in preferences.Chapter 1 explores the mechanism through which receiving bribes leads evaluators to distort choices. In both a laboratory experiment in the US and an experiment in a market in India, evaluators receive bribes that distort their quality recommendations. We show that the driver of distortion is greed and not reciprocity.Chapter 2 examines how self-deception affects judgment distortion in the presence of incentives. We show that when evaluators can convince themselves that they are behaving ethically, they are more likely to distort their judgment. When self- deception is not possible, recommendations are more honest. This shows that in some cases people are able to behave unethically without suffering from feelings of guilt or shame, by convincing themselves that they are ethical.Chapter 3 explores individuals’ unwillingness to provide negative feedback to others, which results in a “must lie situation”. By asking experimental subjects to evaluate others’ attractiveness, we show that individuals prefer to lie rather than tell an undesirable truth, even if lying comes at a monetary cost to both the person who gives the feedback and the person who receives it.Chapter 4 studies prejudice-based ethnic discrimination, and shows that individuals are more likely to discriminate against others when discrimination can be disguised. We show that individuals do not discriminate in contexts where discrimination cannot be plausibly justified. However, discrimination emerges in contexts in which discriminatory behavior can be attributed to conformity to social or moral norms.Chapter 5 explores gender differences in preferences for competitiveness, which have been suggested to partly account for the relative lack of success of women in many sectors of the labor market. We introduce a novel measure that captures the extent of competitiveness. We find that the gender gap in competitiveness is larger than what had been documented before, with strikingly lower ratios of women at the top of the competitiveness distribution