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"Economic motivation"
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Mindful Economics: The Production, Consumption, and Value of Beliefs
In this paper, we provide a perspective into the main ideas and findings emerging from the growing literature on motivated beliefs and reasoning. This perspective emphasizes that beliefs often fulfill important psychological and functional needs of the individual. Economically relevant examples include confidence in ones' abilities, moral self-esteem, hope and anxiety reduction, social identity, political ideology, and religious faith. People thus hold certain beliefs in part because they attach value to them, as a result of some (usually implicit) tradeoff between accuracy and desirability. In a sense, we propose to treat beliefs as regular economic goods and assets—which people consume, invest in, reap returns from, and produce, using the informational inputs they receive or have access to. Such beliefs will be resistant to many forms of evidence, with individuals displaying non-Bayesian behaviors such as not wanting to know, wishful thinking, and reality denial.
Journal Article
The Mechanics of Motivated Reasoning
Whenever we see voters explain away their preferred candidate's weaknesses, dieters assert that a couple scoops of ice cream won't really hurt their weight loss goals, or parents maintain that their children are unusually gifted, we are reminded that people's preferences can affect their beliefs. This idea is captured in the common saying, “People believe what they want to believe.” But people don't simply believe what they want to believe. Psychological research makes it clear that “motivated beliefs” are guided by motivated reasoning—reasoning in the service of some self-interest, to be sure, but reasoning nonetheless. People generally reason their way to conclusions they favor, with their preferences influencing the way evidence is gathered, arguments are processed, and memories of past experience are recalled. Each of these processes can be affected in subtle ways by people's motivations, leading to biased beliefs that feel objective. In this symposium introduction, we set the stage for discussion of motivated beliefs in the papers that follow by providing more detail about the underlying psychological processes that guide motivated reasoning.
Journal Article
Happy economics : why the happiest workplaces are the most successful
\"Happiness at work matters. But what does happiness mean? How can managers measure it and have more if it? And what happens to organizations when they get happiness right? Ask anyone. Happiness and wellbeing are important for all organizations, because they undeniably lead to economic happiness and financial success for everyone involved. But how does happiness drive growth and how should business leaders develop happier companies? In Happy Economics, business expert Mark Price clearly demonstrates why the opportunity represented by happiness is huge for businesses. Using real world examples of those organizations who have got it right, he explains what happy economics is, why happiness metrics matter, connects high happiness with high performance, explores how to create happy teams and he creates a corporate happiness plan that can be used by any business\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically
Research yields ample evidence that individual's behavior often reflects an apparent concern for moral considerations. A natural way to interpret evidence of such motives using an economic framework is to add an argument to the utility function such that agents obtain utility both from outcomes that yield only personal benefits and from acting kindly, honestly, or according to some other notion of “right.” Indeed, such interpretations can account for much of the existing empirical evidence. However, a growing body of research at the intersection of psychology and economics produces findings inconsistent with such straightforward, preference-based interpretations for moral behavior. In particular, while people are often willing to take a moral act that imposes personal material costs when confronted with a clear-cut choice between “right” and “wrong,” such decisions often seem to be dramatically influenced by the specific contexts in which they occur. In particular, when the context provides sufficient flexibility to allow plausible justification that one can both act egoistically while remaining moral, people seize on such opportunities to prioritize self-interest at the expense of morality. In other words, people who appear to exhibit a preference for being moral may in fact be placing a value on feeling moral, often accomplishing this goal by manipulating the manner in which they process information to justify taking egoistic actions while maintaining this feeling of morality.
Journal Article
The harder they fall, the faster they rise: Approach and avoidance focus in narcissistic CEOs
Drawing on theoretical underpinnings of approach-avoidance motivation and CEO narcissism, we provide a framework examining stronger approach focus (motivation towards desirable outcomes) and weaker avoidance focus (motivation away from undesirable outcomes) in narcissistic CEOs using a quasi-natural experimental setting—the economic crisis beginning in 2007. Because highly narcissistic CEOs possess lower avoidance motivation in the precrisis period, their firms face greater declines in the onset of the crisis. However, their greater tendency towards approach motivation enables narcissistic CEOs to increase firm performance in the postcrisis period. While narcissistic CEOs are less likely to protect against potential shocks, they are adept at helping firms recover from such shocks. Using a sample of 392 CEOs representing 2,352 CEO firm-years, we find support for the proposed framework.
Journal Article
Reclaiming Virtue Ethics for Economics
Virtue ethics is an important strand of moral philosophy, and a significant body of philosophical work in virtue ethics is associated with a radical critique of the market economy and of economics. Expressed crudely, the charge sheet is this: The market depends on instrumental rationality and extrinsic motivation; market interactions therefore fail to respect the internal value of human practices and the intrinsic motivations of human actors; by using market exchange as its central model, economics normalizes extrinsic motivation, not only in markets but also in social life more generally; therefore economics is complicit in an assault on virtue and on human flourishing. We will argue that this critique is flawed, both as a description of how markets actually work and as a representation of how classical and neoclassical economists have understood the market. We show how the market and economics can be defended against the critique from virtue ethics, and crucially, this defense is constructed using the language and logic of virtue ethics. Using the methods of virtue ethics and with reference to the writings of some major economists, we propose an understanding of the purpose (telos) of markets as cooperation for mutual benefit, and identify traits that thereby count as virtues for market participants. We conclude that the market need not be seen as a virtue-free zone.
Journal Article
The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks
This paper investigates the impact of tax changes on economic activity. We use the narrative record, such as presidential speeches and Congressional reports, to identify the size, timing, and principal motivation for all major post-war tax policy actions. This analysis allows us to separate legislated changes into those taken for reasons related to prospective economic conditions and those taken for exogenous reasons. The behavior of output following these more exogenous changes indicates that tax increases are highly contractionary. The effects are strongly significant, highly robust, and much larger than those obtained using broader measures of tax changes.
Journal Article
Carrots and Rainbows: Motivation and Social Practice in Open Source Software Development
Open source software (OSS) is a social and economic phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the motivations of contributors to information systems development. Some developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create OSS as part of their employment contract. For the past 10 years, a substantial amount of academic work has theorized about and empirically examined developer motivations. We review this work and suggest considering motivation in terms of the values of the social practice in which developers participate. Based on the social philosophy of Alasdair Maclntyre, we construct a theoretical framework that expands our assumptions about individual motivation to include the idea of a long-term, value-informed quest beyond short-term rewards. This motivation-practice framework depicts how the social practice and its supporting institutions mediate between individual motivation and outcome. The framework contains three theoretical conjectures that seek to explain how collectively elaborated standards of excellence prompt developers to produce high-quality software, change institutions, and sustain OSS development. From the framework, we derive six concrete propositions and suggest a new research agenda on motivation in OSS.
Journal Article