UiS School of Business and Law Seminar: Moral Balancing

Abstract:
This study explores the concept of ‘moral balancing’, which describes situations where agents take into account past moral behaviour when making moral decisions. Through a lab setting, we examine the role of agents’ prior luckiness or antisocial behaviour on subsequent prosocial and antisocial behaviour. Our experiment consists of two stages. In the first stage, agents are provided with an endowment that, depending on the treatment, is determined by either luck or their reported outcome from two privately rolled six-sided dice. In the second stage, agents select how to allocate an endowment between themselves and the charity Feed the Children, which is framed either prosocially or antisocially.