COMPLETED PAPERS
"A Theory of Causal Responsibility Attribution,"
CESifo Working Papers, 2022, Nr. 9898,
revise and resubmit at Economic Journal.
Abstract: People frequently reward and punish other people if they perceive them to be responsible for the implementation of events that they like or dislike. When the implementation of an event depends on the interaction of multiple persons and, potentially, moves of nature, the determinants of such responsibility perceptions are not well understood. In this paper, I propose a notion of causal responsibility which attempts to objectively capture the causal importance of a person's action for the implementation of an event in such situations. The notion is based on counterfactual and probabilistic reasoning and can be applied to settings with simultaneous and/or sequential moves. Experimental evidence confirms the predictions regarding responsibility perceptions. I incorporate the notion in a framework of responsibility preferences and study its implication for the design of voting rules. Finally, I show that the notion can explain experimentally elicited punishment and reward patterns in multi-agent situations that are not well-explained by existing social preference theories.
"Ideological Motives and Group Decision-Making,"
CESifo Working Papers, 2022, Nr. 8742,
under review.
Abstract: Ideological considerations are becoming increasingly relevant in many economic, managerial, and political decisions. In this paper, we study experimentally when and how ideological motives shape group decision-making. Groups repeatedly decide between a monetarily beneficial outcome that generates a high payoff but also an ideologically undesirable externality, or an ideologically beneficial outcome that generates a low payoff and no externality. Groups that disagree forgo all payoffs. An independent part of the experiment serves to classify subjects as ideologically or payoff motivated individuals. We find that ideologically motivated group members are, after disagreement, significantly less likely to give in than payoff motivated subjects. As a consequence, groups which disagree initially are later more likely to agree on the ideologically beneficial outcome. Thus, we document how ideologicallymotivated people can steer groups towards ideological commitments held by only a minority of group members. Furthermore, our treatments show that increasing the group size has no impact on the decisions of ideologically motivated group members, but significantly increases the rate with which payoff motivated group members agree on the ideologically beneficial outcome. These results are theoretically predicted by fixed but not by malleable ideological preferences. Additional treatments show that social image concerns, peer pressure or reputation effects are unlikely to explain the group size effect, and that individual ideological commitment and its influence on group outcomes is much weaker when the externality is ideologically desirable.
"Control Aversion in Hierarchies,"
with Alessandro De Chiara, Holger Herz, and Esther Manna,
CESifo Working Papers, 2022, Nr. 9779,
accepted at Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.
Abstract: Companies typically control various aspects of their workers’ behaviors. In this paper, we investigate whether the hierarchical distance of the superior who imposes such control measures matters for the workers’ ensuing reaction. In particular, we test, in a laboratory experiment, whether potential negative behavioral reactions to imposed control are larger when they are implemented by a direct superior rather than a hierarchically more distant superior. We find that hierarchical proximity indeed magnifies such control aversion and discuss several potential channels for this result.
"Efficiency Wages with Motivated Agents,"
with Jesper Armouti-Hansen, Lea Cassar, and Anna Deréky,
Games and Economic Behavior, 2024, Vol. 145: 66-83.
Abstract: Many jobs are connected to a prosocial mission, i.e., they have a positive impact on society beyond profit-maximization. This paper uses a modified principal-agent gift- exchange game with positive externality (mission treatment) to study how the mission interacts with the use of efficiency wages in motivating effort. We find that, compared to a standard gift-exchange game (GE treatment), the presence of the mission shifts the agents’ effort choice function upwards without affecting its slope. This means that mission and efficiency wages are independent in motivating effort and, thus, that if principals were profit-maximizers, wage offers should be the same in both treatments. However, principals offer higher wages in the mission treatment. We show that this is due to principals in the GE treatment highly underestimating agents’ reciprocity and thereby offering wages below the profit-maximizing level. The results from two robustness-checks further suggest that our findings are unlikely to be driven by a simple efficiency effect but, rather, by the presence of the positive externality – independently, however, from the quality of the mission-matching.
"Spillover Effects of Institutions on Cooperative Behavior, Preferences, and Beliefs,"
with Arno Riedl and Roberto A. Weber,
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2021, Vol. 13(4): 261-99.
Abstract: Most institutions are limited in scope. We study experimentally how enforcement institutions affect behavior, preferences and beliefs beyond their direct influence over the behaviors they control. Groups play two identical public good games, with cooperation institutionally enforced in one game. Institutions generally have economically significant positive spillover effects to the unregulated game. We also observe that institutions enhance conditional cooperation preferences and beliefs about others’ cooperativeness, suggesting that both factors are drivers of observed spillover effects. In additional treatments, we provide evidence for several factors, including characteristics of institutions, that enhance or limit the effectiveness and scope of spillover effects.
with Björn Bartling and Roberto A. Weber,
Journal of the Economic Science Association, 2015, Vol. 1: 72-85.
Abstract: Cason and Plott (2014) show that subjects’ misconception about the incentive properties of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) value elicitation procedure can generate data patterns that look like — and might thus be misinterpreted as evidence for — preferences constructed from endowments or reference points. We test whether game form misconceptions are necessary to produce willingness-to-pay (WTP) vs. willingness-to-accept (WTA) gaps in a valuation experiment in which subjects are randomly assigned to the role of either buyer or seller. We employ a design that allows us to identify whether a subject understood the incentive properties of a price-list version of the BDM mechanism. We find a robust WTP-WTA gap, even among subjects whose elicited valuations for a good of induced and known monetary value and whose ability to identify the payoffs resulting from their choices indicate an understanding of the incentive properties of the BDM mechanism. We conclude that game form misconceptions are not a necessary condition for the emergence of WTP-WTA gaps.
"Does Willful Ignorance Deflect Punishment? – An Experimental Study,"
with Björn Bartling and Roberto A. Weber,
European Economic Review, 2014, Vol. 70: 512-524.
Abstract: This paper studies whether people can avoid punishment by remaining willfully ignorant about possible negative consequences of their actions for others. We employ a laboratory experiment, using modified dictator games, in which a dictator can remain willfully ignorant about the payoff consequences of his decision for a receiver. A third party can punish the dictator after observing the dictator׳s decision and the resulting payoffs. On the one hand, willfully ignorant dictators are punished less if their actions lead to unfair outcomes than dictators who reveal the consequences before implementing the same outcome. On the other hand, willfully ignorant dictators are punished more than revealing dictators if their actions lead to fair outcomes. We conclude that willful ignorance can circumvent blame when unfair outcomes result, but that the act of remaining willfully ignorant is itself punished, regardless of the outcome. Models of procedural fairness combining ex ante and ex post fairness qualitatively predict the observed punishment pattern.