Resumo

During the last decades, there has been a heated debate related to the effects of a business background on ethical behavior. According to some authors, students majoring in business courses – such as accounting, economics, and management – would be more likely to free ride or defect from coalitions in collective action situations, given the emphasis of such courses on individualistic values.

The present paper revisits this debate, by studying the impact of business education on compliance behavior in a specific type of information commons (libraries).

This paper brings three main contributions to distinct literatures. First, the results here reported relate to a sparse set of contributions focused on the behavior of economists in laboratory and field settings (Carter & Irons, 1991; Frank et al., 1993). Second, when comparing the behavior of users subject to different kinds of sanctions, the present paper adds to a transdisciplinary literature on the importance of distinct types of incentives. Finally, the results here presented dialogue with an established literature in social dilemmas, with an emphasis on common-pool resource management.

Employing a novel dataset related to more than 700,000 library transactions during a 10-year period (2006-2015), I correlate business background with users’ compliance behavior, employing fixed-effects econometric estimations, while controlling for their time-invariant characteristics.

I anticipate the main result of the paper: when estimating the effects of business background on compliance behavior in libraries, I cannot find a significant effect of such a background on compliance in this specific setting. That is, library users with a business background do not present statistically significant differences when compared to users with other university backgrounds. This result is in line with recent contributions in business ethics that question the influence of business education on individual orientations and political views.

The results reported in the paper have important implications for ethical theories in business, with an emphasis on standard explanations of organizational behavior, such as principal-agent theory, transaction-cost economics, and teamwork theory.

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