Ignorance enables individuals to act immorally. This is well known in policy circles, where there is keen interest in lowering moral ignorance. In this paper, we demonstrate the relevance of demand elasticity to ignorance by showing that small monetary incentives can significantly reduce...

We investigate the elasticity of preferences for moral ignorance with respect to monetary incentives and social norm information. We propose a model where uncertainty differentially decreases the moral costs of unethical behavior, and benchmark the demand curve for moral ignorance against a...

Willingness to vaccinate and test are critical in the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effects of two measures to increase vaccination and testing: "choice architecture" and monetary compensations. Choice architecture has the goal of "nudging" people into a socially desired direction without...

In a tedious real effort task, subjects know that their piece rate is either low or ten times higher. When subjects are informed about their piece rate realization, they adapt their performance. One third of subjects nevertheless forego this instrumental information when given the choice - and...

In auction and mechanism design, Myerson's classical regularity condition is often too weak for a quantitative analysis of performance. For instance, ratios between revenue and welfare, or sales probabilities may vanish at the boundary of Myerson regularity. This paper introduces L-regularity as...

As was recognized by Bentham, skillfulness is an important source of pleasure. Humans like achievement and to excel in tasks relevant to them. This paper provides controlled experimental evidence that striving for pleasures of skill can have negative moral consequences and causally reduce moral...

We study how institutional design in influences moral transgression. People are heterogeneous in their feelings of guilt and can share guilt with others. Institutions determine the number of supporters necessary for immoral outcomes to occur. With more supporters required, every supporter can...

This paper analyzes how moral costs affect individual support of morally difficult group decisions. We study a threshold public good game with moral costs. Motivated by recent empirical findings, we assume that these costs are heterogeneous and consist of three parts. The first one is a standard...

This paper explores the role of cheap excuses in product choice. If a product improves upon one ethically relevant dimension, agents may care less about other independent ethical facets of the product. Opting for a product that fulfills one ethical aspect may thus suffice for keeping a high...

We elicit concern for animal welfare in an incentivized, direct and real setup that allows us to separate genuine interest in animal welfare from confounding factors like advertisement, replacement arguments or image concerns. Subjects choose between intensive farming and organic living...