Perception of Greed and Unfairness

Abstract

In the past decade, interest in greed among empirical business scholars has emerged. It starts with the trailblazing attempt to analyze greed by Wang and Murnighan (2011), followed by the development of the Dispositional Greed Scale by Seuntjens et. al. (2015a, 2015b), which serves as a basis for the research done by Zhu et. al. (2019) and Bao et. al. (2020). However, since Seuntjens’ work, the overwhelming focus has been on greed as a disposition to “always want more and never being satisfied with what one currently has” (Seuntjens et. al., 2015b). Independently, Cheung (2019) proposed a more sophisticated philosophical analysis of greed, which argues that there are three dimensions of greed, and its dimension of unfairness has largely been neglected. This article reports on our investigation of that neglected dimension of greed. Our cross-cultural study (n=395) shows that when the rating of greediness was not very high, the perception of greed went hand in hand with the perception of unfairness, such that there was a positive linear association between the two. The demographics of the participants suggests that the sample is diverse enough to make a broad generalization. The result of this study confirms the conception of greed in Cheung (2019), which claims that the perception of unfairness, i.e., (2) above, is a significant component of perceived greed. Cheung’s account of greed can also explain the data when the rating of greediness is very high, but logically there could be other explanations.