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APPLIED BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: MORAL CLEANSING AND MORAL LICENSING IN A MARKETING CONTEXT
Companies frequently request their customers to donate to a charitable organization at some point during the purchasing process. Especially in an online environment, companies can easily control at which stage in the customer journey consumers are asked to give to charity. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the sequence of purchase and donation requests in the customer journey influences the willingness to donate to an NGO and the willingness to pay for the company’s product. As theoretical frame, we use two related concepts of moral self-regulation stemming from behavioral economics, namely moral licensing and moral cleansing. Based on these two cognitive biases, we assume that the sequence of donation and purchase options has an influence on the money individuals are willing to spend on the product and are willing to donate to charity. Prior research on moral licensing and moral cleansing often relies on outcomes from rather artificial study designs. Studies often utilize moral/immoral decision tasks, which consumers barely ever encounter in real life settings. In line with recent calls for replicating or validating established cognitive biases in settings that are more realistic, we apply both moral licensing and moral cleansing in a setting, which closely resembles real-life situations. Hence, our study contributes to the advancement of behavioral economics by offering outcomes with a higher degree of ecological validity. Participants (N=121) were asked to indicate the maximum amount of money they were willing to donate (WTD) for an environmental organization and the maximum amount of money they were willing to pay (WTP) for a newly launched smartphone. In condition A, participants were first presented with the donation task (moral licensing); in condition B, participants were first presented with the purchase task (moral cleansing). Our results indicate that the moral cleansing effect is present. On average, participants who first indicate their WTP are subsequently more prone to donating money to an NGO. We could not observe a moral licensing effect at large.
