Is there a useful nudge that helps to change public opinion about ethics in the Bank industry?

Abstract

The major financial crisis occurred in 2008 and scandals involving corruption or lack of ethics enhance supervisors, regulators and financial entities to reflect upon Bank’s ethics in their industry. Main contributions from Behavioural Economics with scientific breakthroughs by Nobel laureates’ Kahneman and Thaler, respectively, provide a better understanding of human behaviour and their biases or demonstrate the usefulness of practical approaches like nudges. The goal of this academic work is to understand if the use of nudges in the Bank industry achieves positive outcomes in people’s perception about Bank’s ethics and go beyond in what helps build a trustful and ethical relationship.Our study used the Corporate Ethical Virtues Model (abbreviated CEV Model) to measure the ethical culture of an organization and was enriched by a qualitative methodology based in a template analysis which analysed deeply all interviews made to a group of fifteen participants from the Banking industry.The results of our study revealed an identification of the main dimensions of the CEV Model and were able to bring new insights, identifying three different new dimensions: professionalism, reputation and closeness. These findings are interesting to enrich the CEV Model, specially, as they are strongly connected with human characteristics that people most value in measure the ethical culture of an organization, particularly, in the Banking industry. The perception of the participants indicates that Bank’s ethics must improve while the use of nudges and their degree of usefulness, are considered high or very high.

Date of Award	18 Oct 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	João César das Neves (Supervisor)