We study moral judgments regarding budgetary slack made by participants at the end of a
participative budgeting experiment in which an expectation for a truthful budget was present.
We find that participants who set budgets under a slack-inducing pay scheme, and therefore
built relatively high levels of budgetary slack, judged significant budgetary slack to be
unethical on average, whereas participants who set budgets under a truth-inducing pay
scheme did not. This suggests that the slack-inducing pay scheme generated a moral frame …