Markets and Morality: Do Free Markets Corrode Moral Values?

Economists have studied the boundary between markets and government, but the issue of what should and should not be on the market largely has remained in the domain of legal theorists who worry that market alienability can corrode moral values. The goal of this project is to bridge this gap between positive studies by economists and normative debates by legal scholars. Techniques from empirical microeconomics are applied to investigate the role of market forces in shaping morality. The innovation is to apply natural field experimental techniques from applied microeconomics to empirical moral philosophy and interactive epistemology. Outlining a set of projects designed to study the role of market forces on morality, experimental research designs are employed to mitigate or eliminate omitted variable biases. With an innovative series of field experiments using disaggregated labor markets, various aspects of the free market experience-commodification, competition, disintermediation, and information-are isolated and investigated to determine how these dimensions of the free market affect moral judgment. The theme is the use of experimental designs to understand the formation of normative commitments.