undoing economics education

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Mar 24 11:21:17 PST 2002


"If Teaching Economics Discourages Cooperation, Can the Damage Be

Undone?"

BY: JEFFREY P. COHEN

University of Hartford

Barney School of Business

HARVEY S. JAMES

University of Missouri at Columbia

Department of Agricultural Economics

Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=296134

Date: December 2001

Contact: HARVEY S. JAMES

Email: Mailto:HJames at missouri.edu

Postal: University of Missouri at Columbia

Department of Agricultural Economics

Agribusiness Research Institute

124 Mumford Hall

Columbia, MO 65211 UNITED STATES

Phone: 573-884-9682

Fax: 573-882-3958

Co-Auth: JEFFREY P. COHEN

Email: Mailto:jcohen at mail.hartford.edu

Postal: University of Hartford

Barney School of Business

200 Bloomfield Ave

West Hartford, CT 06117 UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT:

We conducted an experiment to determine whether students exposed

to an ethics module were, on average, more likely to forgo the

incentive to defect in a prisoner's dilemma game. We find that

the teaching of ethics can mitigate the possible adverse

incentives of the prisoner's dilemma, but only when participants

interact face-to-face.

Keywords: Prisoner's dilemma game, experimental game theory,

ethics, economics education



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