HEIMANN Marco

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Social responsibility is on the rise, both in companies and in management schools. However, training in this area is most often achieved by adding general courses dedicated to Corporate Social Responsibility under multiple names (sustainable development, business ethics, etc.) to curricula and training programs. Thus, highly technical specialties such as finance are slow to integrate responsible management practices into their teaching. This form of implementation, which is more in line with the transversal and holistic nature of CSR, also seems more likely to train future managers who are effectively responsible. In order to verify this, a pedagogical experiment was carried out with 142 students in a Master's degree in finance at iaelyon, a public university management school. The experiment consisted of a responsible investment game that allowed us to analyze the students' investment behavior over a period of four months. The use of extra-financial information by the students was studied through the level of responsibility of their portfolios. An in-depth analysis and discussion of both expected and atypical results was then conducted, leading to both theoretical and practical perspectives in terms of CSR training.

This study created an investment simulation to examine whether motivations for socially responsible investing (SRI) expressed in reports by individual investors affect their investments. Using a quantitative and qualitative methodology, the study reveals a discrepancy between investor declarations and portfolio choices. This discrepancy is interpreted through the paradigm of cognitive dissonances. Solutions to limit disruptions to the decision-making process are then considered.

Social responsibility is on the rise, both in companies and in management schools. However, training in this area is most often achieved by adding general courses dedicated to Corporate Social Responsibility under multiple names (sustainable development, business ethics, etc.) to curricula and training programs. Thus, highly technical specialties such as finance are slow to integrate responsible management practices into their teaching. This form of implementation, more in line with the transversal and holistic nature of CSR, also seems more likely to train future managers who are effectively responsible. In order to verify this, a pedagogical experiment was carried out with 142 students in a Master's degree in finance at iaelyon, a public university management school. The experiment consisted of a responsible investment game that allowed us to analyze the investment behavior of the students over a period of four months. The use of extra-financial information by the students was studied through the level of responsibility of their portfolios. An in-depth analysis and discussion of both expected and atypical results was then conducted, leading to both theoretical and practical perspectives in terms of CSR training.

This study created an investment simulation to examine whether motivations for socially responsible investing (SRI) expressed in reports by individual investors affect their investments. Using a quantitative and qualitative methodology, the study reveals a discrepancy between investor declarations and portfolio choices. This discrepancy is interpreted through the paradigm of cognitive dissonances. Solutions to limit disruptions to the decision-making process are then considered.

Purpose: The research shows how overall performance can help foster trust in financial institutions. While a climate of is trust amongst investors and the general public towards financial institutions is since recent turmoils on the financial markets, we believe that mutual funds adopting overall performance can help recover a climate of trust due to the implied balance between economic, social and environmental performance. More specifically, overall performance promotes values that are similar to investors’ values and could be used by responsible investment funds if they want to contribute to the restoration of trust in investment funds. Method: Using an innovative, experimental design, we test the effect of value similarity on the trust that investors have in the investment fund. This effect cannot be studied in isolation, which is why we compare it with the effects of financial performance and ethical labelling on trust. Findings: We find that funds with similar values are perceived as more trustworthy by investors. Consequently, overall performance should be added to a fund managers toolbox if she wants to foster trust in her fund. The effect of financial performance on trust applies only when the investor has no other information regarding the fund. As for the ethical labelling of funds, it has no effect on trust. Research implications: Our findings encourage research that aims to develop a comprehensive approach of integrated overall performance focusing on financial and extra financial values.

The housing crisis of 2008 and more recently the European debt crisis spread a climate of mistrust amongst investors and the general public. We argue that financial institutions can foster trust through socially responsible investment funds thus contributing to global economic performance. We predict, however, that only funds with moral values similar to the ones of investors, are perceived to be more trustworthy than funds with different or without values. Using an innovative experimental design, we test the effect of value similarity and compare it to the effect of past financial performance. We find value similarity to be the underlying factor of the effect of social responsibility on trust. Simply labeling a fund as ethical did not impact trust ratings, and financial performance had a more general effect.

In order to identify the motivations of individual investors for SRI and to verify whether the motivations they express actually affect their investments, we set up a simulation of investment choices. Using an original methodology, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, we arrived at the following results: in their discourse, it is the outperformance potentially provided by SRI that motivates investors, taking into account institutional or social pressure, independent of any financial consideration. In the choices made, the outperformance expressed as a motivation is only found in the portfolios of certain investors, those whose financial performance is not good. In order to make these results intelligible, in particular for banks and financial institutions looking for solutions that would allow them to capture this category of investors, we have mobilized the concept of cognitive dissonances that disrupt the decision-making mechanism.

Drawing on altruism literature and studies on socially responsible investment (SRI) we explore graduate students’ altruist and profit motivation to consider extra financial information in a stock investment game. We follow a fully mixed concurrent equal status design. We rely on qualitative analysis of unstructured reports about the stock selection process to infer the set of motivations underlying ESG integration. Quantitative modelling allows for assessing whether motivation to integrate ESG analysis also results in more responsible investments by regressing the weights of top tier ESG companies in portfolios on motivation frequencies expressed in the reports. To evaluate contextual and more stable factors, we also include financial performance of portfolios in the regression analysis. We find that motivation induced by the expectation of a financial advantage is the main driver of ESG integration. The effect of financial motivation for ESG integration on ESG investments, however, is moderated by the financial performance in the following way: Investors who declared integrating ESG values for financial performance only had a greater share of top tier ESG companies in their portfolios when their portfolios underperformed the market. This result confirms and extends previous findings on SRI investor behaviour in down markets.

We applied a technique borrowed from the field of bioethics to test whether justice-related factors influence laypersons’ decisions concerning business ethics. In the first experiment, participants judged the acceptability of remuneration policies and in the second that of executive bonuses. In each study, participants judged a set of 36 situations. To create the scenarios, we varied (a) retributive justice—the amount of remuneration. (b) procedural justice—the clarity of the procedure that determined the remuneration. (c) distributive justice—the extent of the distribution of bonus payments amongst employees. and (d) restorative justice—a special compensation for hazardous working conditions or accidents at work. K-means clustering of all 36 judgments revealed four different personal positions in both experiments. One group of people readily accepted all situations. The other three groups’ judgments were mainly a function of distributive justice modulated in different ways by the context determined by the other variables. Furthermore, people conceive of distributive justice as categorical: Acceptability judgments only increase if companies give bonuses to all employees. Granting bonuses to a subset (i.e. mangers or executives) does not increase acceptability. Our results are useful for policy makers and provide business ethics researchers with a novel technique.

This thesis concerns decisions in complex situations that involve economic and moral values. Chapter 2 introduces moral decisions in economic contexts by proposing situations of empirical interest. The topic of Chapter 4 is restoring trust in mutual funds. The main results suggest that the positive effects of the SRI approach depend on the similarity of the individual investor's values with those of the fund. Chapter 5 provides a picture of the social acceptability of executive compensation and the social acceptability of a company's overall compensation policies. The main result indicates the existence of groups of people who are judged on the basis of personal views on the justice of compensation. Chapter 6 introduces an experimental game (the conceal-reveal dilemma) that allows for the study of individuals who have a choice between revealing and hiding benefits that would be judged as undeserved by others. The main result is that choices are not based on a cost-benefit analysis. Consequently, appealing to moral values may be an interesting alternative in such situations. Finally, the last two chapters (Chapter 7 and Chapter 8) discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these empirical results.

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We introduce the Conceal or Reveal Dilemma, in which individuals receive unfair benefits, and must decide whether to conceal or to reveal this unfair advantage. This dilemma has two important characteristics: it does not lend itself easily to cost-benefit analysis, neither to the application of any strong universal norm. As a consequence, it is ideally suited to the study of interindividual and intercultural variations in moral-economic norms. In this paper we focus on interindividual variations, and we report four studies showing that individuals cannot be swayed by financial incentives to conceal or to reveal, and follow instead fixed, idiosyncratic strategies. We discuss how this result can be extended to individual and cultural variations in the tendency to display or to hide unfair rewards.