The morality of markets in theory and empirics

By Ginny Seung Choi & Virgil Storr. 

"Originally published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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The academic conversation on the relationship of markets and morality is a longstanding one. While both the critics and defenders of markets acknowledge that markets can and do substantially and undeniably increase the material wealth of nations and improve people's lives materially, the dominant view within this academic debate and the social discourse around it is that markets can and often do corrupt the moral values of the people whose lives they touched. Interestingly, the topic has been underexplored empirically and it is possible to discuss the morality of markets quantitatively and qualitatively. In this article, we survey the quantitative economic literature on prosocial behavior as it relates to the market, its values, its actors and their interactions. While the evidence does not uniformly nor definitively tip the scale to a side of the debate, the bulk of the evidence suggests that markets, by and large, encourage prosocial attitudes and promote prosocial behavior."