Do economic incentives alter ethical attitudes to vulnerable stakeholders in developing countries? Lessons from a controlled experiment

Scholars argue that studies in business administration, more than other fields of study, expose self-interest and narrow economic assumptions. This can have negative consequences for ethical attitudes to stakeholders beyond a firmʹs shareholders. To study this, we carried out a controlled experiment and examined if economic incentives affected a cohort of business studentsʹ ethical attitudes to vulnerable stakeholders in a developing country as compared to a cohort of engineering students. For the business students, we found that economic incentives tended to legitimize an ethically questionable investment on issues that were related to relativism and egoism. The results were the opposite for the engineering students. Women were more ethically sensitive than men on issues that were related to universal fairness. The study discusses the findingsʹ implications for management theory, education, and practice.