Greed: Taking a deadly sin to the lab

Michael Razen and Matthias Stefan

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2019, vol. 81, issue C, 164-171

Abstract: The term greed has become very popular in the public debate. It is regularly argued, for instance, that greed is one of the deep-rooted reasons for the financial crisis, numerous incidents of fraud and growing inequalities in wealth. Despite its prominent role in current debates, however, empirical research on greedy behavior is rather sparse. We argue that the major impediment for observing greed empirically is the difficulty to separate it from related behaviorial conceptualizations. To overcome this methodological problem, we propose a modified version of the classic dictator game which allows us to unambiguously distinguish greed from similar types of behavior in an experimental environment. We find that greed is indeed observable under laboratory conditions and that it is even one of the predominant behaviors. We also find that feelings of entitlement significantly increase the frequency of greedy behavior. Further, our results indicate that feelings of social obligation have no impact on the proportion of greedy behavior, but result in equal sharing being the predominant choice.

Keywords: Experimental economics; Greed; Entitlement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D91 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804319300618
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:soceco:v:81:y:2019:i:c:p:164-171

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2019.06.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().