Three laboratory studies investigate the hypothesis that the presence of wealth may influence people's propensity to engage in unethical behavior. In the experiments, participants are given the opportunity to cheat by overstating their performance or by stealing money. In each study, one group...

This paper investigates whether an employee's perception of customer wealth affects their likelihood of engaging in illegal behavior. We propose that envy and empathy lead employees to discriminate in illicitly helping customers based on customer wealth. We test for this hypothesis in the...