Program > Program by speaker > Kurschilgen Michael

People use moral wiggle room to behave selfish. But does a narrow wiggle room necessarily produce better social outcomes? When people disagree on normative goals, economic theories of self-image predict that narrowing the moral wiggle room will make choices not only less selfish but also even more heterogeneous, and thus potentially more conflictive. I test this conjecture experimentally in a modified dictator game with and without moral introspection. My results confirm the theoretical predictions, revealing a large disparity of moral valuations of efficiency vs. equality. (C91, D03, D63, A13, Z13)