I am an applied behavioral economist with experience in experimental and quantitative methods, game theory, and labor and discrimination economics. I am interested in social preferences, the perception of others in decision-making, and the role of both communication and norms or stereotypes in economic exchanges and business settings.
Revisiting Erat and Gneezy’s White Lies Paradigm (w/ Haritima Chauhan, forthcoming 2024, Journal of Economic Psychology).
When Pretty Hurts: Beauty Premia and Penalties in eSports Contracts (w/ Haritima Chauhan and Steven Kistler). 2024, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
Gender Penalties and Solidarity -- Teaching Evaluation Differentials in and out of STEM (w/ Andrew Hussey). 2023, Economics Letters).
Show No Quarter: Combating Plausible Lies with Ex Ante Honesty Oaths (w/ Haritima Chauhan, Journal of Economic Science Association.
Initiating Free-flow Communication in Trust Games. Babin, JJ and Chauhan, HS (2023). Frontiers in Behavioral Economics.
You Can’t Hide Your Lying Eyes: Honesty Oaths and Misrepresentation (w/ Fenndy Liu and Haritima Chauhan). 2022, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Vol. 98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2022.101880
Abstract: Lying about race or personal characteristics for a job or in college admissions is common and has recently become a high-profile issue. In this paper, we explore the decision to misrepresent oneself and determine how honesty oaths impact personal characteristic reporting. To do this, we execute an experiment on Amazon MTurk, using a self-reporting task involving human eye color. We find that honesty oaths elicit more truthful behavior – primarily reducing implausible lies (maximal outcome lies). As a result, we spent 27.6% less on bonuses than we would have without oath-taking. There is some evidence that if one believes lying is common, they are more likely to lie as well. We conclude that oaths decrease extreme misrepresentation and expectations of group behavior significantly impact the decision to deceive.Keywords: oaths; lying; misrepresentation; eye color; beliefs; deception JEL Codes: C90, D90, D91Abstract This paper examines the effects of instructors’ attractiveness on student evaluations of their teaching. We build on previous studies by holding both observed and unobserved characteristics of the instructor and classes constant. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that many instructors, in addition to traditional teaching in the classroom, also teach in the online environment, where attractiveness is either unknown or less salient. We utilize multiple attractiveness measures, including facial symmetry software, subjective evaluations, and a novel, proxy methodology that resembles a “Keynesian Beauty Contest.” We identify a substantial beauty premium in face-to-face classes for women but not for men. While gender on its own does not impact teaching evaluation scores, female instructors rated as more attractive receive higher instructional ratings. This result holds across several beauty measures, given a multitude of controls and while controlling for unobserved instructor characteristics and skills. Notably, the positive relationship between beauty and teaching effectiveness is not found in the online environment, suggesting the observed premium may be due to discrimination. Keywords: Beauty premium; Discrimination; College teaching; Gender gap; Online teaching JEL codes: J70, I29, D90- Collaboration and Gender Focality in Stag Hunt Bargaining (w/ Geraldine Guarin, 2021). Games, 12(2), 39.
Abstract: Knowing the gender of a counterpart might be focal in the willingness to collaborate 2 in team settings that resemble the classic coordination problem. This paper explores whether knowing a co-worker’s gender affects coordination on the mutually beneficial outcome in a socially risky environment. In an experimental setting, subjects play a one-shot stag hunt game framed as a collaborative task in which they can “work together” or “work alone.” We exogenously vary whether workers know the gender of their counterparts pre-play. When gender is revealed, female players tend to gravitate to collaboration and efficient coordination, regardless of the knowledge. Males, when knowingly paired with another male, tend to collaborate less, and thus, are less likely 9 to coordinate on the Pareto optimal outcome. These results demonstrate one way that gender focality can lead to inefficient outcomes and provide insight for organizations looking to induce collaboration among workers.Keywords: stag hunt; gender; coordination; focality; teamwork; collaboration JEL Classification: C72, D90, D70, D81Stay at Home Orders, Loneliness, and Collaborative Behavior (w/ Marine Foray and Andrew Hussey). 2021, Economics and Human Biology, Vol. 43(1).
Abstract: The outbreak of COVID-19 resulted in numerous jurisdictions instituting “shelter-in-place'' orders (SPOs). While designed to restrict or impede normal levels of social proximity, SPOs altered the way or degree to which workers interact with each other and have likely imposed a toll on employee well-being. The authors exploit the temporal and geographic variation in U.S. SPOs to investigate their effect on loneliness among online workers. Variation in loneliness is then linked to worker behavior in a simple two-person, collaborative task (a framed stag hunt). The analysis reveals a strong positive relationship between SPOs and loneliness on average, peaking during the wave associated with the most prolonged duration of isolation. SPOs disproportionately impacted workers in occupations not substantially involving teamwork or collaboration. As reported loneliness increases, the probability of an individual collaborating in a simple interactive workplace scenario decreases significantly. In the final survey wave, SPOs are scarcer, loneliness subsides, and cooperative behavior increases dramatically. Keywords: loneliness, collaborative behavior, teamwork, shelter-in-place orders, COVID-19, games, stag huntThis paper reports the results of an experiment involving text-messaging and emojis in laboratory trust games executed on mobile devices. Decomposing chat logs, I find that trust increases dramatically with the introduction of emojis to one-shot games, while reciprocation increases only modestly. Skin tones embedded in emojis impact sharing and resulting gains – to the benefit of some and detriment to others. Both light and dark skin players trust less on receipt of a dark skin tone emoji – suggestive of statistical discrimination. In this way, computer-mediated communication leads to reduced gains for dark-skinned persons. These results highlight the complex social judgment that motivates trust in an anonymous counterpart.Keywords: Trust game; Emojis; Computer-Mediated Communication; Trust; Stereotypes; Skin tone; DiscriminationJEL Codes: C78; C91; C92; D8; D63; D71This paper assesses income inequality between markets as a factor in the arrest rates at NFL stadia over five years. Using two novel measures, we find that as the difference in economic inequality between team markets increases, so does the expected number of fan arrests at NFL games. Our results are robust across several specifications and inequality measures as we control for game-time factors, metropolitan economic characteristics, behavioral aspects of fan expectations and rivalry, ticket prices and alcohol, and other unobservable aspects of home stadia in a fixed-effects environment. We conclude that as access to professional sporting events increasingly becomes the domain of the wealthy, so does criminally offensive behavior that goes beyond alcohol-fueled “crimes of passion” -- the consequence of wealth-driven friction between visiting spectators and home team fans.Keywords: Crime; Arrest rates; National Football League; Inequality; Fan arrestsJEL Codes: Z21, H80, D91, Z29Individuals often make decisions based on perceived social norms and widely-held stereotypes. It is often difficult to elicit such beliefs since subjects commonly give inaccurate or “politically correct” responses to subjective, sensitive topics. This paper compares two methodological procedures meant to identify group beliefs. In an experimental setting, I pair a flat-rate, opinion-mining scheme with an incentivized coordination game and compare their effectiveness in identifying the well-documented Math-Gender stereotype. Following a simple math task prime, those in the baseline overwhelmingly stated they individually believed neither sex is inherently more proficient at mathematics, while 72% of those in the incentivized treatment said that they believed “males are more proficient” would be the modal response. Gender nor age drives this focal outcome; however, political orientation appears to influence the perception of the stereotype. These results both document the usefulness of an incentivized coordination game as a research tool and demonstrate how stereotypes persist independent of whether or not they are individually held or stated.Keywords: Opinion-mining · Incentivized coordination games · Social norms · Gender stereotypes · Group beliefs JEL classification: C81 · C91 · C92 · D91 · C7 