Behavioral economics and Monetary Wisdom: The Enron Effect—Love of money, Corporate Ethical Values, Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), and dishonesty across 31 geopolitical entities

Monetary Wisdom asserts that individuals apply their deep-rooted values (the love of money attitudes, avaricious monetary aspirations) to frame critical concerns in the immediate-proximal and omnibus-distal contexts and strategically select certain options to maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity across context, people, and time at the individual, organizational, and national-global levels. This study explores the dark side of decision-making, e.g., avaricious monetary aspirations and corruption (dishonesty). Corruption involves greed, money, and risky decision-making. It is a risky prospect, involving a cost-benefit analysis of self-interest. We frame good or bad barrels in the environmental context as a proxy of high or low probability of getting caught for dishonesty, respectively. We theorize: Two levels of the subjective norm—perceived Corporate Ethical Values at the micro level (CEV, Level 1) and Corruption Perceptions Index at the macro level (CPI, Level 2), collected from multiple sources, jointly impact the magnitude and intensity of the relationships between love of money and dishonesty. Based on 6382 managers in 31 geopolitical entities across 6 continents, our cross-level three-way interaction effect illustrates the following discoveries: As expected, managers in good barrels (high CEV/high CPI), mixed barrels (low CEV/high CPI or high CEV/low CPI), and bad barrels (low CEV/low CPI) display a low, medium, and high magnitude of dishonesty, respectively. Context matters. With high CEV, the intensity is the same across cultures. With low CEV, the intensity of dishonesty is the highest in high CPI entities (risk seeking in the high probability context)—the Enron Effect, but the lowest in low CPI entities (risk aversion in the low probability context). Interestingly, CPI has a strong impact on the magnitude of dishonesty, whereas CEV has a strong impact on the intensity of dishonesty. We demonstrate dishonesty in light of monetary values and two frames of social norms, revealing critical implications to the field of business ethics. This chapter makes robust theoretical and practical contributions to Monetary Wisdom and business ethics.