[jdmichal]

Not OP, but this is how I see it. It's a bit like the daycare late fines experiment:

https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...

Here's a digestible Freakonomics bit which discusses the same:

http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what...

When there was not a price on being late, the price paid was actually moral. That is, being late was a bad thing to do and so you should feel bad. However, when a monetary price was introduced, it was no longer morally bad to be late, as long as you paid the fee. The monetary-price replaced the moral-price, and it ended up that there were a lot of people willing to pay money where they weren't willing to pay morally. And so the truancy rate rose with introduction of late fees.

I would guess that that is what OP meant. If you introduce a price, you can actually remove even stronger restrictions that are in place based on morality. Because as long as you're being charged, you can assume the price is inclusive of your moral hazard.

[gnode]

> I would guess that that is what OP meant. If you introduce a price, you can actually remove even stronger restrictions that are in place based on morality. Because as long as you're being charged, you can assume the price is inclusive of your moral hazard.

This, but also that a dividend gives a mandate to continue.

I'd say that dividends and fines are distinct, in that a fine typically comes with the understanding that wilfully continuing what you got fined for will result in an even larger fine. Conversely, accepting money in return for some wrong committed against you would typically make it harder to get an injunction against that activity.

[wutbrodo]

I'm not sure it makes sense to model companies as moral agents in the same way you would individuals, especially when you're talking about unintuitive moral reasoning that leans heavily on individual feeling, like the Haifa daycare study. Hell, I thought it was a pretty common belief around here (and more broadly) to model corporations as amoral utility-maximizers, in which case a fine is the central way of aligning incentives (for non-criminal actions).

[gnode]

Even when modelling corporations as amoral entities, they still exist within a morally aware system. They are to some extent beholden to their customers, employees, and courts of law, which all make decisions of morality about their actions.

A dividend (or similar payment) generally improves the legitimacy of an action, whereas being fined for it does not.