1 Which Agent Do You Prefer: Sinful Success or Virtuous Failure? Amna Kirmani, Rebecca Hamilton, and Debora V. Thompson Extended Abstract February 25, 2010 Imagine that you are looking for a real estate agent to help you sell your house. Agent A has sold many houses. You’ve heard that she sometimes withholds information from the buyer about problems with a house in order to close the deal. Agent B has sold fewer houses. You’ve heard that she is always up front about revealing information, even if it might hurt the sale. Which agent would you prefer? Consumers often make trade-offs between two important dimensions of evaluation, competence and morality (Wojciszke 1994). Competence reflects an agent’s skill or effectiveness in achieving goals, while morality reflects an agent’s honesty. Prior research suggests that moral judgments are more important than competence judgments in evaluations of both individuals (Skowronski and Carlston 1987) and groups (Ellemers, Pagliaro, Barreto, and Leach 2008). In fact, morality tends to be given more weight than competence in general impression formation (De Bruin and Van Lange 2000). We refer to this phenomenon as the “morality effect.” In the situation described in the opening vignette, the morality effect would predict that Agent A, the more moral agent, would be preferred to Agent B, the more competent agent. However, self-interest suggests that a seller might prefer an agent who is likely to get the job done to an agent who may fail to do so. Thus, the agent’s ability to successfully achieve the consumers’ goal may override the morality effect. In this paper, we examine some conditional boundaries of the morality effect in a marketing context. Our fundamental premise is that whereas the morality effect may dominate