We have all likely experienced this: purchasing something we do not truly need and later realizing we may have been influenced by the producer’s claims. In his lecture, Bertil Tungodden examines how our moral judgments of corporate behaviour develop and what this means for consumer protection policies.  

Join us for Bertil Tungodden's talk on Tuesday, 25 November 2025, from 11:45 - 13:15 in Y213 or online on Zoom:

https://uni-konstanz-de.zoom.us/j/99645527345?pwd=CXBQ14bRmoSCoYCafGa5TCdeKpANbH.1  

Meeting ID: 996 4552 7345
Meeting code: 270524 

Title: The Business of Mistakes: Moral Acceptability of Consumer Exploitation

Abstract: The rise of behavioral economics has revealed that consumers often make systematic mistakes that businesses can exploit. This raises a fundamental moral question: Is it morally acceptable for firms to sell products that consumers would be better off not buying? In a global study across 40 countries, we show that a large majority of respondents view such consumer exploitation as morally wrong, yet at the same time believe that businesses routinely engage in these practices. Moral preferences and beliefs about firm behavior strongly predict attitudes toward consumer regulation, both across individuals and across countries. We identify three distinct moral types—Libertarians, Substantialists, and Proceduralists—and show that their prevalence at the country level is closely linked to support for consumer regulation. In a second large-scale study in the United States, we examine how moral acceptability depends on the nature of firm behavior—whether the firm manipulates information, exploits a behavioral bias, or provides all relevant information—and on beliefs about whether consumers can avoid mistakes through effort. Finally, we relate moral preferences to real-world political and market behavior. Taken together, the results provide novel global evidence on how people evaluate firm behavior that takes advantage of consumer mistakes and how these moral views shape support for consumer protection policies.

Bertil Tungodden is a Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics at NHH Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway. He is a Scientific Director of the Centre of Excellence, FAIR- Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality, and co-director of the research group The Choice Lab. His research interests are experimental and behavioural economics, development economics, distributive justice and social choice theory.

May-Britt Sterba will chair this colloquium. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality" at the University of Konstanz. She is an economist by training, and did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods with a focus on fairness attitudes towards economic inequality. Her research interests include experimental economics, perceptions of fair and unfair inequalities and political philosophy.