Research

Abraham, D., Greiner, B., & Stephanides, M. (2023). On the Internet you can be anyone: An experiment on strategic avatar choice in online marketplaces. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 206, 251-261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.11.033

Abraham, D., Corazzini, L., Fišar, M., & Reggiani, T. (2023). Coordinating donations via an intermediary: The destructive effect of a sunk overhead cost. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 211, 287-304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.05.006  

Working Papers

"Motivational Effects of Feeling Trusted" (with Ondřej Krčál) link

We investigate whether feeling trusted or distrusted by a manager affects the motivation to work. In a laboratory experiment, responsibility for a manager’s earnings is divided unequally between two workers. We vary whether this responsibility allocation decision is made by the manager, or by a random device on the manager’s behalf. Importantly, being assigned more or less responsibility for the manager's payoff does not change the workers' wages. Despite this, we find that workers provide less effort when they are intentionally, as opposed to randomly, assigned a lower level of responsibility. This negative effect is mediated by the workers' emotional response when learning that the manager chose to place her trust in the other worker. We find no positive effect of being trusted. Our results demonstrate that managerial decisions do not need to have payoff consequences in order to affect workers' motivation and effort choices

"The Effect of Voluntary Vulnerability on Dictator Giving" link

I design a trust game in which trust is expressed solely as an intention to become vulnerable to others based on positive expectations about their behavior. Potential recipients in a dictator game choose whether or not they want to enter the game: if they choose to stay out, the game ends and both players receive their initial endowments; if they choose to enter, dictators can send the recipients a positive amount but can also take money from them. Entering this game thus signals the recipient's willingness to trust the dictator by accepting vulnerability to the dictator's actions. In a control treatment, the recipient's entry is determined by the outcome of a random lottery and thus cannot convey the recipient’s trusting intention. In the aggregate, I find that dictators do not react to the recipient's trusting intention. Using symmetric treatments without take options for the dictator, I show that having recipient's voluntarily enter the dictator game reduces the experimenter demand effects often believed to drive giving behavior in the standard version of the game with passive recipients.

"The hidden costs of enforcing minimum contributions to a global public good" (with Katarína Glejtková and Ondřej Krčál) link

We study how different types of individuals respond to being forced to make a minimum contribution to a global public good. Participants in our experiment decide how much of their endowment to contribute toward offsetting CO2 emissions. We elicit their contributions when they are free to spend any amount of their endowment on carbon offsets and when they are forced to spend a certain minimum amount on it. We find that those who contribute in excess of the minimum before it is imposed contribute less overall once the minimum comes into effect. This is true for both a low and a high level of the minimum and appears to be driven in part by pessimistic beliefs about the contributions of others. We show that the lower minimum also reduces overall contributions of the entire sample relative to a situation with no minimum. We do not find evidence that having the level of the minimum determined through a majority vote rather than an exogenous procedure has any material impact on these results.

"Does Discrimination Beget Discrimination? The Effect of Exclusion on Ingroup Bias" (with Astrid Hopfensitz) link

We examine whether being included or excluded can create a focal identity dimension that forms the basis for subsequent discrimination. Using a version of the minimal group paradigm, we induce two artificial identities and create a situation in which one participant in every 3-member team is excluded from the team based on their identity profile and forced to work alone. The other two (included) members of the team work together. We find that while there is no effect on excluded participants, the included members of the team exhibit greater ingroup bias on the identity dimension that formed the basis for their inclusion (i.e., the included identity dimension) over the identity dimension that played no role in their inclusion. Relative to participants in a baseline condition who experienced neither exclusion nor inclusion, we find suggestive evidence that included participants are more likely to choose to interact with those who share their identity on the included dimension. They further report feeling closer to their ingroup on this dimension over the other. Our results indicate that being included creates a focal identity that affects the individual's subsequent choices and behavior.

Work-in-Progress

"Upstream Corrections and Team Performance" (with Maria Policiuc)