In this project, I explore the antecedents and consequences of employees’ unethical pro-organisational behaviour (UPB) through the lens of moral decoupling – a moral reasoning process whereby individuals separate their perceptions of morality from their perceptions of performance. First, I argue that employees increase their engagement in UPBs when they (1) see their supervisors doing the same and (2) believe that their supervisors endorse moral decoupling. Second, I argue that employees’ UPBs are only positively related to supervisors’ evaluations of their job performance when supervisors themselves report that they morally decouple. I test these hypotheses in a field sample of supervisor¬–employee dyads and two experimental studies. This combination of studies highlights the complex link between ethics and perceptions of performance in organisations.

Many firms and individuals generate content online and offer them to consumers in a specific fashion: Besides the main content, they also produce samples or previews. Interested consumers will further consume the main content. Recently, pay-what-you-want (PWYW) has emerged as a new and popular monetisation method both in the offline world (e.g., entrance fee to museums, performances, etc.) and in cyberspace (e.g., live streaming). By PWYW, consumers are given the autonomy to set the price (including zero price) they want to pay for the products. By studying the WeChat Media Platform, this research uses a combination of difference-in-difference and structural empirical models to understand key issues regarding content monetisation and preview design. For instance, we examine how previews should be designed when PWYW becomes trendy, and the potential substitutions between different monetisation methods for content providers.

Relying on a quasi-natural experiment instituted by air quality regulations during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, we examine the effect of air pollution on auditors’ behaviours. We find that a 1-percent increase in the air pollution index increases the percentage of work hours necessary for an auditor to audit a firm by 4 percent. This effect is more pronounced when the leader of an audit team is more entrenched, is older, or male. Further analysis reveals that audit quality and audit fees are not affected by air pollution. We conclude that air pollution reduces auditors’ work efficiency.

A collaboration with Assistant Professor Fan Qiao of Duke-NUS Medical School, we plan apply the genome-wide association study (GWA study, or GWAS) approach to identify genetic variants in association with occupational well-being indices, such as survey measures of happiness, job satisfaction, and psychological distress. Furthermore, occupational characteristics, such as job complexity, will be used in conjunction with genetic markers, to examine the gene-environment interaction. For this study, we will study data collected from the UK Biobank, a research project that recruited more than half a million people aged between 40-69 years between 2006 and2010 across the UK. The UK Biobank project is unique because it covers a very broad range of areas such as genetics, health, social relationship, eating behaviours, and work.

Previous research into law and corporate social responsibility mostly assumes that the vertical structure of production is exogenous. By outsourcing, a brand may avoid some liability and responsibility, but lose direct control over the evasive actions that cause harm. Here, we analyse the trade-off between avoidance of liability and control over evasion. (i) Evasive actions reduce production costs, and so, evasion increases with the speed/scale of production. Under outsourcing, the brand may depress speed/scale to induce less evasion. (ii) Maximising welfare requires comparing welfare under vertical integration and outsourcing, and so, is an inherently non-convex problem. (iii) If demand is elastic, the cost of production is high or enforcement is weak, then vertical integration is optimal. It discretely raises welfare by raising production speed/scale (increasing consumer benefit by more than production costs), and lowering evasion (reducing harm by more than it raises production costs).