Yale School of Management - Faculty

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior

Daylian Cain joined the Yale School of Management after serving as Harvard’s Russell Sage Fellow of Behavioral Economics. A former Canada Science Scholar, Cain has three master’s degrees and earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. Cain teaches award-winning graduate/executive-level courses such as "Business Ethics Meets Behavioral Economics" and "Negotiations: Beyond Win-Win."

Cain’s research combines behavioral economics and moral psychology in an effort to determine how people make decisions. He is especially interested in decisions about pro-social behavior and how people fail to live up to their own standards, e.g., "smart people doing dumb things, good people doing bad things." Cain is a leading expert on conflicts of interest and co-editor of Cambridge Press’s Conflicts of Interest (2005).

Cain’s research has been discussed in the The New Yorker, Forbes, the Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and on CNN Financial News. Cain is mentioned in the recent book Economics 2.0: What the Best Minds in Economics Can Teach You About Business and Life.

Achievements and Awards
Yale SOM's Elective Teacher of the Year, 2011

Society of Business Ethics (SBE) Paper of the Year, 2010

"Featured Presenter" at SBE, 2006

Inaugural "Founders Award" at SBE, 2005

Herb Simon Dissertation Award & Gerald Salancik Proposal Award for "The Dirt on Coming Clean: Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest," which the Committee for the Fiduciary Standard named among the most relevant research studies on fiduciary reform

Selected Books
Conflicts of Interest: Problems and Solutions from Law, Medicine, and Organizational Settings (with D.A. Moore, and G. Loewenstein, and M. Bazerman, eds.), Cambridge University Press, 2005

Selected Articles
"Giving vs. Giving-in" (with J. Dana and G. Newman), Academy of Management Annals, forthcoming

"Pitfalls and Potential of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest," (with G. Loewenstein and S. Sah), American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 2011

"When Sunlight Fails to Disinfect: Understanding the Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest," (with G. Loewenstein and D. A. Moore), Journal of Consumer Research, 2011

"Everyone’s a Little Bit Biased (Even Physicians)" (with A. Detksy), Journal of the American Medical Association, 2008

"Overconfidence & Underconfidence: When and Why People Underestimate (and Overestimate) the Competition," (with D.A. Moore), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 103, No. 2, 197-213, 2007

"What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Me: Costly (But Quiet) Exit in Dictator Games," (with J. Dana and R. Dawes), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 100, No. 2, 193-201, 2006

"The Dirt on Coming Clean: The Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest," (with G. Loewenstein and D. A. Moore), Journal of Legal Studies, January, 1-25, 2005

"The Dirt on Coming Clean" has been twice reprinted: in J. Hooker and P. Madsenthe, eds., Carnegie Bosch international Management Series: International Corporate Responsibility, 2007 and in J.H. Arlen and E.L. Talley, eds., Experimental Law and Economics, 2008

Selected Book Chapters
"Moral Self-Regulation: Licensing & Compensation" (with C. Zhong and K. Liljenquist), in D. De Cremer, ed., Psychological Perspectives on Ethical Behavior and Decision Making, Information Age Publishing, 2009

"Regulating Behavior off the Books'" in B. Mannix, M. Neale, and A. Tenbrunsel, eds., Research on Managing Groups and Teams: Ethics and Groups, Vol. 8, 13-38, JAI Press, 2006

Selected Working Papers
"The Burden of Disclosure" (with S. Sah and G. Loewenstein), under review at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

"Making Sense of Overconfident Entry" (with D.A. Moore and M.K. Chen), under review at the Strategic Management Journal

"Reluctant Altruism: An Experimental Investigation" (with J. Dana)

"Who is the Fairest of them All? Using Justice Sensitivity to Predict Genuine Altruism" (with S. Lotz, T. Schlosser, and D. Fetchenhauer)

"The More the Merrier: Perverse Effects of Additional Victims on Ethical Judgments" (with U. Haran)

Education
Russell Sage Fellow, Harvard University, 2006 - 2007
PhD Carnegie Mellon University, 2007
MS Carnegie Mellon University, 2003
MA UNC-Chapel Hill, 2002
MA, Dalhousie University, 1997
First Class Honor's BA, Dalhousie University, 1996