Designing Safeguards that Work: Three Essays on Carrots, Sticks, and Guardrails

 Workers often face a choice between approaching their responsibilities honestly or  doing so using deception or shortcuts. Workplace dishonesty imposes considerable  reputational, financial, and cultural costs upon affected institutions. Consequently,  organizations have set out to understand what drives dishonesty in the workplace,  with many developing carrots, sticks, and guardrails to promote desired behaviors.  My dissertation contains three papers, each focusing on one of the interventions  described. I draw on literature in psychology and economics to understand (1) how  incentives for honesty interact with the psychological drivers of misconduct and (2)  whether these incentives can be improved by leveraging behavioral insights. The  current work aims to highlight the critical role of behavioral science in creating  empirically rigorous organizational policy.