How does the email matter to the civic honesty? A comment on Cohn et al. (2019)

• Author: Marc Oliver Rieger,Toan Luu Duc Huynh,Mei Wang
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12217

Bus Soc Rev. 2020;125:387–391.

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387

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/basr

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INTRODUCTION

Honesty is not an abstract definition because Burton (1963) indicated that a morally correct conduct

would be defined as the honest behavior. Therefore, it is difficult to judge the behavior between failing

to return a lost wallet and the tendency of taking possession of others’ property in the study of Cohn

Received: 3 October 2020

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Accepted: 30 October 2020

DOI: 10.1111/basr.12217

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

How does the email matter to the civic honesty? A

comment on Cohn et al.(2019)

Toan Luu DucHuynh1,2

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MeiWang1

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Marc OliverRieger3

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction

in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2019 The Authors. Business and Society Review published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of W. Michael Hoffman Center for Business

Ethics at Bentley University. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

1WHU – Otto Beisheim School of

Management, Chair of Behavioral Finance,

Vallendar, Germany

2University of Economics Ho Chi Minh

City, School of Banking, Ho Chi Minh

City, Vietnam

3University of Trier, Chair of Banking and

Finance, Trier, Germany

Correspondence

Toan Luu Duc Huynh, WHU – Otto

Beisheim School of Management, Chair of

Behavioral Finance, Vallendar, Germany.

Email: toan.huynh@whu.edu

Abstract

Cohn et al. (2019) designed the field experiment about the

lost wallets across 40 countries to examine whether people

attempt to contact the owners to return the 17,000 wallets.

We discussed the design flaw in their experimental settings

by reanalyzing the relationship between the rates of wallet

return, in the Cohn et al. (2019)’s data, and the percentage

of the Internet penetration (over population) as an upper

bound of proportion email users. We found that countries

with limited access to email have a lower rate of wallets’

return after controlling other factors. Furthermore, we re-

visited the Abeler et al. (2019)’s aggregated data to study

whether the dishonest behaviors in the laboratory could

predict the actual honesty behavior or not. It turns out that

what happens in the lab makes no sense to our reality. This

comment contributes to the extant literature about an ex-

perimental designation for honesty studies.

KEYWORDS

comment, experiment, honesty