Conflict of interest and the intrusion of bias

By Don A. Moore, Lloyd Tanlu, Max H. Bazerman. Judgment and Decision Making, 2010

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the psychology of conflict of interest by investigating how conflicting interests affect both public statements and private judgments. The results suggest that judgments are easily influenced by affiliation with interested partisans, and that this influence extends to judgments made with clear incentives for objectivity. The consistency we observe between public and private judgments indicates that participants believed their biased assessments. Our results suggest that the psychology of conflict of interest is at odds with the way economists and policy makers routinely think about the problem. We conclude by exploring implications of this finding for professional conduct and public policy.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3a24c97537e5f95f51e7c5fb24f2fd10f7a15a3

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Citations in the corpus

Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers (2012, unknown): “The importance of incentives within the firm has long been appreciated (see Baker, Jensen, and Murphy (1988) for a review),3 yet most empirical work that credibly identifies exogenous variation in performance incentives has focused on relatively simple production tasks (see Lazear (2000); Bandiera, ”
Outsider Oversight: Designing a Third Party Audit Ecosystem for AI Governance (2022, background): “Similar dynamics have been found in credit rating agencies [39, 70], supply chain audits [142], and accounting audits [110].”