On May 4, Eddy presented his research paper on relative performance information in employee giving programs with the WHU research community.
He focused his presentation and discussion on the following questions: Can relative performance information about employees' charitable contributions activate ethics spillovers? Under which conditions does such a spillover exist (when employees donated time or money)? And does such an ethics spillover lead to more ethical decision-making afterwards? With his co-authors Qinnan Ruan (also Tilburg University) and Huaxiang Yin (Nanyang Technological University), Eddy conducted an experiment to answer these questions. They find that ethics spillovers exist when public relative performance information is present and employees donate money (not time).
After the seminar, Eddy also gave valuable feedback to the doctoral students at the IMC for their own research.
Eddy Cardinaels is full Professor of accounting at Tilburg University and part-time professor at KU Leuven. His work combines new insights from psychology and behavioral economics to study how different information presentation (ABC, BSC, summaries of earnings releases) can affect decision making of managers within companies. Other experimental work focuses on drivers of honest reporting and social motives in inter-firm negotiations.