Decision Makers Use Norms, Not Cost-Benefit Analysis, When Choosing to Conceal or Reveal Unfair Rewards

Marco Heimann, Vittorio Girotto, Paolo Legrenzi and Jean-François Bonnefon

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-6

Abstract: We introduce the Conceal or Reveal Dilemma, in which individuals receive unfair benefits, and must decide whether to conceal or to reveal this unfair advantage. This dilemma has two important characteristics: it does not lend itself easily to cost-benefit analysis, neither to the application of any strong universal norm. As a consequence, it is ideally suited to the study of interindividual and intercultural variations in moral-economic norms. In this paper we focus on interindividual variations, and we report four studies showing that individuals cannot be swayed by financial incentives to conceal or to reveal, and follow instead fixed, idiosyncratic strategies. We discuss how this result can be extended to individual and cultural variations in the tendency to display or to hide unfair rewards.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073223 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 73223&type=printable (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:plo:pone00:0073223

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0073223

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().