Intégrer la responsabilité sociétale dans les enseignements de spécialité des masters de Finance : la nécessité d'un équilibre

Social responsibility is on the rise in businesses and business schools alike. However, most of management education focuses on general courses of business ethics and specialties like finance are lagging behind in integrating responsible management practices in their curriculum. To experiment with responsible finance education tools we ask whether providing extra-financial information in a stock picking game can be used to lever responsible behavior education? To answer this question 142 graduate students of finance participated in a stock market simulation where they had to manage a virtual portfolio. During four months students were provided with financial, environmental, social and governance information of 600 European companies on a dedicated website. Further, we used an experimental in between subjects two by two design and manipulated reminders of responsibility and reminders of the importance of financial performance within the game. We find that portfolios contain more responsible stocks over time suggesting that habit formation plays a significant role. More interestingly, we show that when students are reminded about the importance of the moral conduct of management without reminding them of the importance of financial performance, the stocks in their portfolios are less responsible. We conclude that finance students can be brought to familiarize and adopt responsible management practices by long term simulations but redoubt moralization of their curriculum. This implies that responsible management educators should not only focus on moral imperatives but also on the importance of a holistic approach to performance. We finally draw links to literature on pro-social behavior and psychological mechanisms that could underlie the investment decisions.