Three Essays in behavioral Ethics on Honesty and Fairness.

Summary This thesis contains three essays in behavioral ethics. Using tools from experimental economics and neurophysiology, our work unveils some of the social and contextual determinants that influence decisions related to honesty or fairness.The first chapter examines how competitive incentives influence the impact of social identity and the nature of the lie on (mis)honest behavior. Our results show that in competition, group identity plays no role, even when experimenters cannot directly observe cheaters' behavior. However, participants are less dishonest when their lies directly affect their opponent than when they only indirectly affect them, but only when the experimenter cannot directly observe their lies.The second chapter examines the effect of being continuously informed of another person's potentially dishonest performance on individuals' dishonesty in both competitive and non-competitive settings. Our results show that, only in competition, participants' dishonesty is not affected by the type of information they receive (continuous or final). This is mainly due to the fact that, when they are not continuously informed, male participants overestimate their opponent's dishonesty. Thus, when they are informed of their opponent's actual behavior, they adapt their behavior and cheat less than when they are not informed.Finally, the third chapter examines whether suffering a loss or gain in a task affects a subsequent sharing decision. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find that losing money, relative to a benchmark, reduces people's generosity, while experiencing a gain subsequently increases individuals' generosity. Contrary to what one might think, the level of emotional arousal experienced when people are informed of the amount received does not explain their sharing decision.