Research

"This paper provides evidence showing that people are more prone to engage in nasty behavior, malevolently causing financial harm to other people at own costs, when they make decisions in a group context rather than when making choices individually on their own. We establish this behavioral regularity in a series of large-scale experiments among university students, adolescents, and nationally representative samples of adults — more than ten thousand subjects in total. We test several potential mechanisms, and the results suggest that individual nasty inclinations are systematically more likely to affect behavior when decisions are made under the “cover” of a group, i.e., in a group decision-context that creates a perception of diffused responsibility."

"In this paper, I bring evidence from a large-scale field experiment on whether providing detailed repeated feedback to students evaluated in groups in different types of tournaments helps them predict their performance more accurately. A high majority of the students in the experiment are overconfident. Feedback alleviates but does not eliminate the problem. Increased accuracy in self-assessment is associated with higher performance but lower happiness, a trade-off that offers an alternative view on the existence of persistent overconfidence. No feedback prior to a tournament makes girls significantly more inaccurate in their self-assessments which may translate into their underperformance relative to boys."

(Previously available as "Persistent Overconfidence: evidence from a randomized control trial in Uganda"). The online appendix can be found here.

"Throughout our lives, we are routinely offered different incentives as a way to motivate us, such as absolute and relative performance feedback, and symbolic, reputation or financial rewards. Many researchers have studied the effects of one or more of these incentives on how people change their performance. However, there can also be important psychological outcomes in terms of stress and happiness. The current paper contributes to the literature by explicitly accounting for this performance-versus-well-being trade-off introduced by incentives. I implement two types of social comparative feedback regimes, within and across-class group comparisons, and two types of incentive regimes, financial and reputation rewards. The results show that rewards can lead to an increase in students’ performance up to 0.28 standard deviations (depending on whether students received feedback and what type), but at a cost of higher stress and lower happiness, whereas comparative feedback alone (without rewards) increases performance only mildly, by 0.09 to 0.13 standard deviations, but without hurting students’ well-being. More stressed students exert less effort, perform worse and attrite by 29 percent more compared to those who are stressed minimally. Furthermore, the results help to identify gender-specific responses to different incentive schemes. Boys strongly react to rewards with or without feedback. In contrast, girls react to rewards only if they are also provided with feedback. Finally, the paper contributes to the expanding literature on incentivized interventions in developing countries by using a rich dataset of more than 5000 primary and secondary school students in Uganda, who were repeatedly tested and interviewed over a full academic year."