What Money Can Buy: How Market Exchange Promotes Values

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: This paper studies market participants’ concerns about the moral and social values of their counterparts in market exchange. Using a survey, a laboratory experiment, and an online experiment, we investigate whether consumers prefer to purchase from counterparts whose behavior indicates support for the consumers’ values—even when those values are orthogonal to the product or transaction—and whether sellers anticipate and respond to such concerns accordingly. We document two key findings supporting these relationships. First, we find that consumers prefer exchanging and are willing to pay more to exchange with counterparts whose actions express support for the consumers’ values, even when the consumers’ purchasing decisions have no instrumental impact on the promotion of those values. Second, when sellers anticipate the possibility of such exchange, they change their behavior to reflect greater support for the values held by buyers. Our findings thus question the typical assumption of impersonality in market exchange and suggest that the presence of opportunities for gain through market transactions may promote and shape the values that individuals publicly support.

Type of resource	text
Date created	August 12, 2021

Author	Weber, Roberto
Author	Zhang, Sili
Organizer of meeting	Exley, Christine
Organizer of meeting	Marquina, Alejandro Martínez
Organizer of meeting	Niederle, Muriel
Organizer of meeting	Roth, Alvin
Organizer of meeting	Vesterlund, Lise

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/gn769ys8633
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/gn769ys8633

Use and reproduction: User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).

Preferred citation: Weber, R. and Zhang, S. (2022). What Money Can Buy: How Market Exchange Promotes Values. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/gn769ys8633

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