Robert Betancourt
Major: Interdisciplinary Mathematics and Economics
Bio: Robert Betancourt is a junior from New York City majoring in Interdisciplinary Mathematics and Economics with a minor in Theology Religious Studies. He intends to pursue graduate school in economics with an eye on behavioral economics.
Title of Research: Moral Costs and Profit Maximizing Behavior
Mentor: Dr. Utteeyo Dasgupta, Department of Economics
Abstract: This project examines the effect of making moral concerns explicit to decision-makers when determining worker layoffs. We adapted Rubinstein (2006) and made our experiment design’s underlying moral dilemma salient. We also collected additional data on students’ attitudes towards cost-benefit reasoning (Larrick et al. 1990, 1993) and on additional demographic information (Hummel 2016) to understand whether these influence layoff decisions. Our results suggest that increasing moral salience does have a positive effect in attenuating layoff decisions. Faced with layoff decisions, 71.3% of employers in the moral salience treatment retained employees above the level required by profit-maximizing behavior in contrast to 61.29% of the employers in the treatment without moral salience. This difference in behavior was mildly significant (p-value of 0.08). We also identified a greater proportion of female respondents (70%) than males (62.5%) retaining workers above the profit maximizing level. In comparison, fewer female respondents (26.67%) than male (47.5%) thought a real manager would maintain above such a level. Our research implies that making moral issues salient to managers improves immoral concerns in the workplace.