Publications
1. Pro-environmental and Climate Behavior
How much can we learn from public good games about voluntary climate action? Evidence from an artefactual field experiment, Ecological Economics (2020), Vol. 171, May 2020, with Timo Goeschl, Sara Elisa Kettner and Christiane Schwieren
One sentence summary: Behavior in standard public good experiments predicts climate-friendly actions only weakly; closer structural resemblance to real-world incentives improves predictive power.
The effects of contemporaneous peer punishment on cooperation with the future. Nature Communications (2020), 11, 1815, with Israel Waichman
One sentence summary: Punishing free-riders within one generation can help sustain public goods for future generations — but it’s only partially successful in the long run.
Levelling up? An inter-neighbourhood experiment on parochialism and the efficiency of multi-level public goods provision, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2019), Vol. 164, Aug. 2019, pp. 500-517 with Carlo Gallier, Timo Goeschl, Martin Kesternich, Christiane Reif and Daniel Römer
One sentence summary: Local attachment doesn’t block people from contributing to global, more efficient public goods.
Giving is a question of time: Response times and contributions to an environmental public good, Environmental and Resource Economics (2017), Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 455–477, with Timo Goeschl and Johannes Diederich
One sentence summary: Contributors spend more time thinking before giving to climate mitigation than free-riders — implying careful deliberation underpins pro-environmental choices.
Comprehension of climate change and environmental attitudes across the lifespan, Zeitschrift für Gerontologie und Geriatrie (2014), 47(6), 490-494, with Christina Degen, Sara Elsia Kettner, Helen Fischer, Joachim Funke, Christiane Schwieren, Timo Goeschl and Johannes Schröder
One sentence summary: Even if older adults understand climate dynamics less, they’re still inclined to worry about and engage in pro-environmental actions.
2. Charity, Philanthropy, and Inter-Charity Competition
Inter-carity competition under spatial differentiation: Sorting, crowding, and splillovers, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization (2023), Vol 216, December 2023, with Carlo Gallier, Timo Goeschl, Martin Kesternich, Christiane Reif, and Daniel Römer
One sentence summary: Local charities attract givign from local donors (sorting) — yet successful fundraising (crowding-in) for one group doesn’t reduce giving to others (no spillovers) in this field experiment.
Inter-charity competition and efficiency: Considerations beyond fundraising and tax incentives for giving The Routledge Handbook of Taxation and Philanthropy (2021), with Kim Scharf
One sentence summary: We examine how charities compete for donations in ways that aren’t always "efficient", suggest policy solutions and discuss the role of charities and the state in providing public goods
3. Social Norms, Information, and Cooperative Behavior
The Role of Facial Cues in Signalling Cooperativeness is Limited and Nuanced, Nature Scientific Reports (2024), Vol 14, Article 22009, with Santiago Sanchez-Pages, and Enrique Turiegano
One sentence summary: We show that static facial images do little to reveal cooperation tendencies on average, but people find it easier to identify those who resemble their own cooperative style.
Beyond Social Influence: Examining the Efficacy of Non-Social Recommendations, European Economic Review (2024), Vol 168, September 2024 with Danae Arroyos-Calvera and Rebecca McDonald
One sentence summary: We find that even "purely random recommendations" can sway risky or generous choices as much as "social recommendations" - challanging the idea that social norms alone drive compliance with social recommendations.
From Social Information to Social Norms: Evidence from Two Experiments on Donation Behaviour, Games (2018), Vol 9, No. 4, with Timo Goeschl, Sara Kettner and Christiane Schwieren
One sentence summary: Social informations increases donations to a climate change initiative through shifting beliefs.
4. Decision Processes, Cognitions and Economic Behavior
Investigations of Decision Processes at the Intersection of Psychology and Economics, Journal of Economic Psychology (2024), Vol 103, with Rima-Maria Rahal, Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Andis Sofianos, and Conny Wollbrant
One sentence summary: This editorial synthesizes contributions to a special issue on how our cognitive processes shape economic decisions.
I'm in a hurry, I don’t want to know! Strategic ignorance under time pressure, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022 with Johannes Jarke
One sentence summary: Under time pressure, people avoid information that might make them feel conflicted, making it easier to make self-serving decisions.
"Cooperation in public good games. Calculated or confused?", European Economic Review (2018), Vol. 120, pp.185-203, with Timo Goeschl
One sentence summary: We find that thoughtful deliberation, not intuition or confusion, often drives higher contributions to public goods —challenging prior claims that cooperation is intuitive.
"Is fairness intuitive? An experiment accounting for the role of subjective utility differences under time pressure", Experimental Economics (2018), with Anna Merkel
One sentence summary: Time pressure doesn’t reliably boost “fair” choices once you account for subjective utility differences.
"Registered Replication Report: Rand, Greene and Nowak (2012)", Perspectives in Psychological Sciences (2017), Vol.12, No.3, pp. 527-542, with Bouwmeester et al.
One sentence summary: A multi-lab replication project study questions whether time pressure really drives more cooperative choices, suggesting earlier findings might have been due to selectively dropping non-compliers (selection).
"Smart or Selfish? - When smart guys finish nice", Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (2016), Vol. 64, p. 28-40
One sentence summary: People with higher cognitive reflection scores contribute more to public goods — unless time pressure prevents them from carefully thinking it through.
5. Other research and policy papers
"Improving compliance with COVID-19 guidance: a workplace field experiment", Behavioural Public Policy, (2023) with Danae Arroyos-Calvera, Michalis Drouvelis, and Rebecca McDonald.
One sentence summary: Well-known behavioral interventions like pledges and social norms raised self-reported compliance but had minimal lasting effects.
Working Papers
"A Healthy Start for Healthy Start Vouchers?", with Hamideh Mohtashami Borzadaran and Emma Frew
This paper examines the impact of a recent increase in the value of healthy start vouchers (HSV) on the purchase of healthy items, using a large and representative sample of 13 million shopping basket transactions from a major UK food retailer. We use a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to show that a £1.15 increase in voucher values increased spending on fruits and vegetables (F&V) for single voucher users by 32p and for two voucher users by 77p. For all eligible items, the increase in the value of the vouchers increased spending by 31p for single voucher users and by 89p for two voucher users. Our analysis of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) indicates that consumers treat vouchers similarly to cash transfers of the same value. We also find that the effects of the HSV program are greater in more deprived areas and areas with lower pre-change expenditure on eligible items, indicating potential benefits for reducing health inequalities. Our results have implications for the effectiveness of targeted benefit programs, such as the UK HSV program, in promoting healthy food choices.
"The swing voter's curse revisited: Transparency's impact on committee voting", with Moumita Deb, Rebecca McDonald and Sid Bandyopadhyay
Majority voting is considered an efficient information aggregation mechanism in committee decision-making. We examine if this holds in environments where voters first need to acquire information from sources of varied quality and cost. In such environments, efficiency may depend on free-riding incentives and the ‘transparency’ regime - the knowledge voters have about other voters’ acquired information. Intuitively, more transparent regimes should improve efficiency. Our theoretical model instead demonstrates that under some conditions, less transparent regimes can match the rate of efficient information aggregation in more transparent regimes if all members cast a vote based on the information they hold. However, a Pareto inferior swing voter’s curse (SVC) equilibrium arises in less transparent regimes if less informed members abstain. We test this proposition in a lab experiment, randomly assigning participants to different transparency regimes. Results in less transparent regimes are consistent with the SVC equilibrium, leading to less favourable outcomes than in more transparent regimes. We thus offer the first experimental evidence on the effects of different transparency regimes on information acquisition, voting, and overall efficiency.
"Cognitive abilities and risk taking: the role of preferences", with Michalis Drouvelis
A growing literature in economics suggests that cognitive abilities and risk preferences could be related. However, since neither risk preferences nor cognitive abilities can be observed directly, it is unclear whether measured associations point towards a true relationship or instead result from systematic measurement errors. Previous studies, which have raised this concern, only test this proposition indirectly. In this paper, we complement their approach by providing a direct test that sheds light on the existence and direction of a link between risk preferences and cognitive abilities once systematic measurement errors are taken into account. Using a lab experiment that employs a repeated choice design, we give participants the opportunity to revise an initial choice made in a simple lottery task. We measure cognitive abilities via the cognitive reflection task and affect individuals' access to cognitive resources by exogenously varying their cognitive load across treatments. Our results provide evidence that cognitive abilities remain strongly correlated with risk preferences after errors are controlled for.
"Active and passive risk-taking", with Anna Merkel and Christian Kersting König
Does risk-taking depend on whether risks result from an action (active risk-taking) or from not taking action (passive risk-taking)? Economic studies of risk mostly focus on active risk-taking, even though in many everyday decisions, risks result from remaining passive. It is unclear whether studying active risk-taking is informative for situations where risks result from passivity, considering theoretical arguments that suggest otherwise. We develop a new experimental risk-elicitation procedure, which we call the Lottery Adjustment Task (LAT) and employ it in two separate experiments to study the size and direction of potential mode-of-choice effects (i.e., differences in risk-taking between active and passive decision modes). While our tightly controlled lab study provides little evidence for the existence of mode-of-choice effects when attention costs are absent, we find substantial evidence for mode-of-choice-effects in an online setting where decisions are spread out over 10 days and attention costs are thus a key feature of the decision.
"Absolute groupishness and the demand for information", with Rebecca McDonald
Does social identity affect how decision makers consume and digest new information? We study this question through a theoretically informed experiment, employing a variant of the sender-receiver game in which receivers can purchase reports from up to two senders. Depending on senders’ preferences for truth-telling, reports are either informative or not. In the baseline condition of our experiment, receivers observe senders’ incentives for reporting truthfully. In the treatment condition receivers additionally observe whether they share a group identity with the sender. Group identities are induced via a standard minimal group paradigm. We find that senders behave in line with a model that assumes senders incur a positive lying cost. Making social identity observable significantly affects information acquisition and makes receivers more prone to ignore potentially informative outgroup reports. This is especially the case when outgroup senders have higher incentives for truthtelling. This change in information acquisition has implications for optimal decision-making: it negatively affects receivers’ ability to correctly infer the true state of world.
"Should transparency be (in-) transparent? On monitoring aversion and cooperation in teams" with Michalis Drouvelis and Johannes Jarke
Many modern organisations employ methods which involve monitoring of employees' actions in order to encourage teamwork in the workplace. While monitoring promotes a transparent working environment, the effects of making monitoring itself transparent may be ambiguous and have received surprisingly little attention in the literature. Using a novel laboratory experiment, we create a working environment in which first movers can (or cannot) observe second mover's monitoring at the end of a round. Our framework consists of a standard repeated sequential Prisoner's Dilemma, where the second mover can observe the choices made by first movers either exogenously or endogenously. We show that mutual cooperation occurs significantly more frequently when monitoring is made transparent. Additionally, our results highlight the key role of conditional cooperators (who are more likely to monitor) in promoting teamwork. Overall, the observed cooperation enhancing effects are due to monitoring actions that carry information about first movers who use it to better screen the type of their co-player and thereby reduce the risk of being exploited.
Ongoing research
"Information and the provision of intergenerational public goods when generations overlap", with Oliver Hauser, Zach Groff and Ben Grodek
"Pollution information and adaptation behavior" with Matt Cole, Rob Elliott and Ceren Ozgen
"The effects of political uncertainty on firm's hiring choices. Evidence from a field experiment during Brexit negotiations.", with Michalis Drouvelis, Hamideh Borzadaran and Rebecca McDonald