Dr. Sumit Sarkar is currently a full professor of economics at the XLRI-Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur. He completed his MA (1997) and Ph.D. (2004) from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He has been a member of the faculty at XLRI since 2007. Earlier, from 2004–2006, he was part of the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kozhikode and of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur from 2006–2007. He teaches microeconomics, game theory, experimental economics, industrial organization, and managerial economics. His areas of research include contract theory, behavioral economics, industrial organization, and behavioral operations management. His current research interest is to study the role of ethics in economic decision-making when contracts cannot be signed, or the contracts are not enforceable.

During his Fulbright-Nehru research fellowship, Dr. Sarkar is experimentally studying how psychological motivators induce economic agents to choose costly actions, and thus act ethically, when they have the option to choose less costly actions, for which they cannot be punished. The objectives of this cross-cultural study are twofold: to experimentally identify the relative importance of three psychological motivators – gratitude, conscience, and reciprocity – for economic agents in choosing costly actions that benefit the principal, in the presence of less costly and unpunishable actions; and to investigate if the relative importance of these psychological motivators depends on the cultural background of the subjects.