The Morality of Markets

Mathias Dewatripont and Jean Tirole
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Mathias Dewatripont: ULB - Université libre de Bruxelles
Jean Tirole: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

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Abstract: Scholars and civil society have argued that competition erodes supplier morality. This paper establishes a robust irrelevance result, whereby intense market competition does not crowd out consequentialist ethics; it thereby issues a strong warning against the wholesale moral condemnation of markets and procompetitive institutions. Intense competition, while not altering the behavior of profitable suppliers, may, however, reduce the standards of highly ethical suppliers or not-for-profits, raising the potential need to protect the latter in the marketplace.

Keywords: Competition; Consequentialism; Replacement logic; Non-profits; Corporate social responsability; Race to the ethical bottom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-hpe, nep-ind, nep-mic and nep-reg
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04695298v1
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Published in Journal of Political Economy, 2024, 132 (8), pp.2655-2694. ⟨10.1086/729445⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04695298

DOI: 10.1086/729445

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