Every Book You Take: Evaluating Compliance Behavior in an Information Commons
Abstract: There has been a heated debate related to the effects of 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. Other authors have challenged that view, presenting empirical evidence that questions the link between business education and opportunistic behaviors. The present paper revisits this debate, by studying the impact of business education on rule compliance in a specific type of information commons (libraries). 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, while controlling for their time-invariant characteristics. I find no evidence of a significant effect of business education on rule compliance in this specific setting. The results reported in the paper have important implications for ethical theories in business and economics, with an emphasis on standard explanations of organizational behavior.
