John Hasnas's scientific contributions
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Publications (15)
Every business faces internal conflicts of interest. They must determine how to motivate employees to cooperate in a productive manner, while also limiting the temptation to exploit the business for private gain. Designing good incentives is essential. If inputs are easy to measure, employees can be compensated based on how much work they do, but i...
There is a division of labor in modern democratic societies. The main way businesses serve society is by producing products and services people want at prices they can afford to pay. A good business exercises corporate social responsibility simply by delivering its core service. There is a role for charitable giving and other causes, but having a w...
Moral psychology indicates that we have a range of quirks which lead otherwise well-meaning people to act badly. These quirks include conformity effects, by which we tend to copy what others do regardless of whether it is good or bad and tend to defer to those we see as authoritative. Framing effects—how a problem is presented—can cause us to chang...
People are evolved to be ethical animals, but also evolved not to be perfectly moral. We suffer from predictable moral failings. Managing for better behaviors requires us to diagnose why good people act badly so that we can form proper strategies for overcoming their foibles. Further, some might be skeptical that there can be a universal ethics and...
People are predominantly but not entirely selfish. However, they do generally have strong degrees of altruistic motivation in certain situations. Good management strategies must be careful not to crowd out intrinsic motivation—in which people do what things for their own sake—for extrinsic motivation—in which people are motivated primarily by rewar...
Sometimes voluntary agreements that are beneficial to all parties can still be unethical. This occurs when the benefits of the agreement are unfairly divided among the parties. The benefits of a mutually beneficial transaction might be exploitative, meaning that one party unconscionably takes advantage of the vulnerability of another party. World p...
Moral confusion in business ethics and corporate social responsibility often stems from treating ethics and law as if they were the same. Ethics and the law often overlap and sometimes conflict. They are distinct categories. Laws may enforce people’s ethical obligations. But they may also contravene them and require unethical action. Because the la...
It is useful to model the temptation to act wrongly using the prisoner’s dilemma, one of the most important games in game theory. The prisoner’s dilemma appears to show that the pursuit of self-interest can paradoxically lead to situations in which everyone makes choices they know will undermine their self-interest. However, introducing the possibi...
Business Ethics for Better Behavior concisely answers the three most pressing ethical questions business professionals face: 1. What makes business practices right or wrong? 2. Why do normal, decent businesspeople of goodwill sometimes do the wrong thing? 3. How can we use the answer to these questions to get ourselves, our coworkers, our bosses, a...
One way to illustrate how to manage a business or oneself for ethical performance is to teach the lesson in a negative form. How would one run a business if one wanted to induce others and oneself to act worse? One would want to create structures that impose perverse incentives, encourage moral blindness, promote moral confusion, create stress and...
Business ethics primarily concerns how businesses conduct themselves and how they make their money. Sometimes businesspeople act badly because they suffer from moral confusion—that is, they are genuinely unsure what moral principles apply to their situation or how to apply them correctly. There are at least five major principles of business ethics...
SMART objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. DUMB values are Disconnected, Unincentivized, Measureless, and Boilerplate. Effective ethical and strategic management techniques promote SMART objectives and avoid DUMB values. However, business leaders often fall into the trap of pursuing DUMB values in part because...
Even if cooperating will make everyone better off, cooperation won’t happen if people lack certain kinds of knowledge and motivation. In group settings, individuals will often have incentives to promote their own interest at the expense of the group, either by exploiting others or by failing to contribute to public goods. There are two ways to over...
People are complicated. Morality is part of what makes us human. We are not just social animals, but animals evolved to have some innate moral concerns. Why, then, do ordinary people sometimes act badly? The answer is: it’s complicated. It’s not as simple as “People are selfish.” Instead, it’s a mix of problems. Sometimes we face bad incentives and...
Diffusion of responsibility refers to the problem that when something is everyone’s job, it in effect ends up being nobody’s job. This explains why many collective problems arise. People face perverse incentives to free ride on others’ actions and not to do their part. As a result, agents often think in short-term rather than long-term ways. Proble...
