Organizations, Diffused Pivotality and Immoral Outcomes

Armin Falk and Nora Szech

No 9522, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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: Morality; Pivotality; Experiment; Organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D03 D23 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9522 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:9522

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9522

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().