Theoretical And Experimental Study Of Intertemporal Moral Behavior

Moral behavior is an integral part of economic interactions and has a major impact on the economy.Due to the invisibility of moral behavior,regulatory costs are high.To manipulate moral choices,we design an experiment on intertemporal moral behavior to analyze the course of moral choices.Chapter one illustrates the research background and significance of the study of moral behavior.Chapter two reviews the studies on lying behavior.We summarize the internal factors and social context that may influence moral choices.We illustrate four widespread experiments on lying behavior and point out the advantages and disadvantages of these experiments.We introduce the new development of the experiments on lying: the experiment on intertemporal moral behavior.Chapter three reviews the psychological studies on moral self regulation.We set a novel theoretical model on intertemporal moral behavior based on psychological studies and Gneezy's economic model.Chapter four illustrates the experiment procedure step by step.There are three novel points in our experiments: first we induce subjects' risk preference before their moral choices,second the payoff structure in both treatments enables us to justify whether the number of choices or the amount involved in each choice has a greater influence on moral choices,third we eliminate the influence of income effect and inequality aversion on moral choice.Chapter five illustrates the results.Those who switch between good and evil are more risk averse.The number of choices has a greater influence on moral choices.We find that moral consistency dominates moral balancing and that moral licensing dominates moral cleansing.The results determine the parameters of our theoretical model.We also analyze the behavior of receivers.Chapter six focuses on the practical meaning of our experiment from the perspective of job performance.Chapter seven makes a conclusion and points out future research prospects.