Organizations, diffused pivotality and immoral outcomes

Armin Falk and Nora Szech

Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change from WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Abstract: This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of eight. In the latter condition eight mice are killed if at least one subject opts for killing. The fraction of subjects deciding to kill is higher when pivotality is diffused. The likelihood of killing is monotone in subjective perceptions of pivotality. On an aggregate level many more mice are killed in Diffused-Pivotality than Baseline.

Keywords: Diffused Pivotality; Moral Decision Making; Committees; Group Decisions; Moral Transgression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D03 D23 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/76879/1/751432385.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Organizations, Diffused Pivotality and Immoral Outcomes (2013)
Working Paper: Organizations, Diffused Pivotality and Immoral Outcomes (2013)
Working Paper: Organizations, Diffused Pivotality and Immoral Outcomes (2013)
Working Paper: Organizations, Diffused Pivotality and Immoral Outcomes (2013)
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:zbw:wzbeoc:spii2013303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change from WZB Berlin Social Science Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().