Research

Work in Progress

• Why don’t you deduct to donate more? Joint work with Michael Hilweg-Waldeck.
  • Anecdotal evidence suggests very low rates of tax deduction for in-person donations in the field. Teaming up with a large Austrian charitable organization, we analyze their historical data and persistently document this phenomenon. To examine the reasons for this negligence of tax incentives, we first implement a representative online survey to collect beliefs on the moral perception of deduction and reasons for which people may be hesitant to deduct. The survey suggests social image concerns and a lack of information for the majority of the population as main drivers. Building on this, we run both an online and a field experiment to study the role of procedural information and social image in more detail. Our results suggest that a mere lack of information on how to deduct one’s donations cannot explain the low rates of deduction for field donations. Similarly, providing people with second-order beliefs on the moral perception of deducting did not induce a higher deduction propensity.
  • Data collection and analysis completed. Working on the first draft!
• Competing Against Stereotypes: Gender Beliefs and the Competition Gap. Joint work with Michael Hilweg-Waldeck.
  • We study the role of second-order beliefs in explaining the gender competition gap. To do so, we extend an existing meta analysis to gather performance and choice data on various tasks used in the literature. Building on this, we run an online experiment to collect belief data on these tasks. First, we note that the extent of the competition gap dependents on the task used. Second, we document important gender differences in beliefs over performance. While men severely overestimate the male performance advantage for all tasks, women report more nuanced beliefs. Further, women’s beliefs about the performance differences display much stronger correlation with the competition gap than the actual performance differences. To test our hypothesis that second-order beliefs causally affect competitiveness, we plan a lab experiment wherein we vary participants’ second-order beliefs.
  • Meta analysis and online experiment completed. Lab experiment will be run soon.
• Don’t hate your luck, hate its shape. Joint work with Michael Hilweg-Waldeck.
  • We explore how the optimal contest size in winner-takes-all tournaments responds to the shape of noise parameter’s (luck’s) distribution. Our theory predicts that, when good/bad luck outcomes are more likely the equilibrium effort is increasing/decreasing in the contest size. Further, the contest size that maximizes the aggregate performance under when bad luck outcomes are more likely is smaller than when good luck outcomes are more likely. However, if the objective is to maximize best possible performance the reverse is true. The reason is that while a larger contest leads to lower efforts, the benefit of having more luck draws dominates in the latter case. We plan an online experiment to confirm our theory results.
  • Theory section completed. Working on the experimental design.
• Inequality as a constraint on (repugnant) markets. Joint work with Jakob Schmidhäuser.
  • Literature has established that third parties are opposed to certain transactions even when they impose no direct externalities on them. Such repugnant transactions are broadly viewed as a constraint on markets. While various reasons for the emergence of repugnance have been discussed, we propose economic inequality as an important channel. In our experiment, people judge 9 different economic transactions in two inequality and one equality treatment. We elicit the main dimensions of repugnance suggested by the literature as well as the willingness to ban each transaction. Our novelty is twofold. First, we are the first to study how inequality affects repugnance. Second, we establish the role of descriptive norms in the context of repugnance by eliciting beliefs about others’ choices.
  • Pilot will be run soon.
• Non-Standard Choice and Matching. Joint work with Gian Caspari, Michael Hilweg-Waldeck.
  • We study the impact of non-standard choice behavior on performance of matching mechanisms. We have planned a series of experiments to compare sequential mechanisms with different menu sizes and levels of choice complexity. By doing so, our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges presented by non-standard choice behavior and provide insights and potential strategies for enhancing mechanism performance. Furthermore, we plan to expand on the existing theoretical framework to incorporate our experimental findings.
  • Working on the experimental design.