Bringing Tax Avoiders to Light: Moral Framing and Shaming in a Public Goods Experiment

Stefanos A. Tsikas and Andreas Wagener

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: With a series of public goods games in a 2x2-design, we analyze two channels that might moderate social dilemmas and increase cooperation without using pecuniary incentives: moral framing and shaming. Cooperation increases when non-contributing to a public good is framed as morally debatable and socially harmful tax avoidance. However, cooperation is only durable when free-riders are "shamed" by disclosing their misdemeanor. We find shaming effects to be strong enough to make appeals to morality redundant for participants' decisions.

Keywords: shaming; framing; tax avoidance; public goods experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H26 H30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-mac, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-633.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:han:dpaper:dp-633

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidrich, Christian ().