Lynn Stout, a professor of corporate and business law, writes in The Atlantic about the ways investors bifurcate their approach to investing and their social goals. She draws on her previous research into prosocial or altruistic behavior to discuss how the context of investing tends to draw the most selfish behaviors out of people. This is reinforced by the problem of the commons: prosocial behavior by individual investors doesn’t exert any real market force but does cost those investors marginal return.
