Research

Publications

Commitment Timing in Coalitional Bargaining (with Simon Siegenthaler), Experimental Economics, 2024, 27, 130-154. Link to article

Most multilateral bargaining models predict bargaining power to emanate from pivotality—a party’s ability to form different majority coalitions. However, this prediction contrasts with the empirical observation that negotiations in parliamentary democracies typically result in payoffs proportional to parties’ vote shares. Proportionate profits suggest equality rather than pivotality drives results. We design an experiment to study when bargaining outcomes reflect pivotality versus proportionality. We find that commitment timing is a crucial institutional factor moderating bargaining power. Payoffs are close to proportional if bargainers can commit to majority coalitions before committing to how to share the pie, but pivotality dictates outcomes otherwise. Our results help explain Gamson’s Law, a long-standing puzzle in the legislative bargaining literature.

Pathways to Prosocial Leadership: An Online Experiment on the Effects of External Subsidies and the Relative Price of Giving (with Blaine Robbins, Daniel Karell and Simon Siegenthaler),  European Sociological Review, 2023. Link to article

Leaders are a part of virtually every group and organization, and while they help solve the various collective action problems that groups face, they can also be unprincipled and incompetent, pursuing their own interests over those of the group. What types of circumstances foster prosocial leadership and motivate leaders to pursue group interests? In a modified dictator game (N = 798), we examine the effects of piece-rate subsidies (or pay per unit of work performed) and the relative price of giving (or the size of the benefit to others for giving) on prosocial behavior and norms about giving. We find that subsidies increase giving by leaders, that the relative price of giving is unrelated to prosocial behavior, and that neither affects norms about giving. Furthermore, the introduction and removal of a subsidy does not undermine giving over time. Our results imply that subsidies increase group welfare by motivating leaders to allocate a larger share of resources to group members.

The Ghost of Institutions Past: History as an Obstacle to Fighting Tax Evasion (with Christian Koch and Nikos Nikiforakis), European Economic Review, 2021, 103641. Link to article

Can a history of evasion affect tax compliance after a major institutional reform? We address this question in a novel laboratory experiment varying the quality of past and present institutions. We find that past institutions continue to exert considerable influence on individuals’ expectations about others’ compliance even after a major, common-knowledge institutional change. Consequently, we observe low compliance in good-quality institutions when there is a history of evasion, but high compliance when there is no such history. These findings suggest that history should not be ignored as it is in traditional models of compliance: the higher evasion has been historically, the stronger incentives may need to be to overcome the “ghost of institutions past”. We show that a society-wide poll in which individuals express their attitudes toward compliance can help break the link with the past.

A Bargaining Experiment with Asymmetric Institutions and Preferences (with Harold Houba), Social Choice  and Welfare, 2019, 52, 329-351. Link to article

We report results from a laboratory experiment on strategic bargaining with indivisibilities studying the role of asymmetries, both in preferences and institutions. We find that subjects do not fully grasp the equilibrium effects asymmetries have on bargaining power and identify how subjects’ observed behavior systematically deviates from theoretical predictions. The deviations are especially pronounced in case of asymmetric institutions which are modeled as probabilities of being the proposer. Additionally, in contrast to previous experimental work, we observe larger than predicted proposer power since subjects frequently propose and accept their second-preferred option. Quantal response equilibrium and risk aversion explain behavior whenever probabilities are symmetric, but less so when asymmetric. We propose the ‘recognition is power’ heuristic which equates bargaining power with recognition probabilities to explain these findings. 

The National Boundaries of Solidarity: A Survey Experiment on Public Support for National and European Unemployment Policies (with Theresa Kuhn), European Political Science Review, 2019, 11, 179-195. Link to article

Amid the European sovereign debt crisis and soaring unemployment levels across the European Union, ambitions for European unemployment policies are high on the political agenda. We don’t know very well, however, what European taxpayers think about these plans, and who is most supportive of European unemployment policies. To contribute to this debate, we conducted a survey experiment on public support for European unemployment benefits in the Netherlands and in Spain. Our results suggest that (1) Europeans are less inclined to show solidarity towards unemployed Europeans than towards unemployed co-nationals, and that (2) individuals with higher levels of education and those who identify as European show more solidarity towards unemployed people, but (3) even they discriminate against foreigners. The prospects for public support for European social policy are therefore not very promising as our findings suggest that the national boundaries of solidarity remain largely intact. 

Experimental Public Choice: Elections (with Arthur Schram), Oxford Handbook of Public Choice (Congelton, Grofman and Voigt, eds.), Oxford University Press, 2018. Link to chapter

This chapter contrasts rational-choice predictions of voter behavior with observations from laboratory and field experiments. Specifically, the authors discuss voters’ party choice and turnout decisions, both for elections under proportional representation and with plurality rule. The first part of the chapter studies turnout and finds mixed support for the comparative statics predicted by the rational-choice framework. In the second part, voters’ party choices are analyzed and it is shown that if we allow for non-selfish preferences, observed behavior is overall in line with the rational-choice approach. The third, and final, part of the chapter analyzes turnout behavior and party choice simultaneously so as to highlight the potential interaction effects between the two. While this question has not received much attention in the literature, the limited evidence currently available is broadly in line with rational-choice predictions. 

Work in Progress

A Simultaneous Analysis of Turnout and Voting under Proportional Representation: Theory and Experiments (with Arthur Schram)

Plurality Voting versus Proportional Representation in the Citizen-Candidate Model: An Experiment

Plurality Voting versus Proportional Representation in the Citizen-Candidate Model: The Role of Coalitions