Research

In times of war, evacuating civilians from conflict zones is of critical importance for their survival and well-being. However, many people are hesitant to evacuate. Text-based nudges are a promising, yet unexplored, venue to increase the willingness to evacuate. We conduct a controlled survey experiment in Ukraine, manipulating the framing of automated alert messages. Our findings suggest that providing individuals with an evacuation plan by the authorities is crucial. The specific framing of the message itself does not seem to play a role in the perceived effectiveness of the messages. Heterogeneity analysis shows that women respond more strongly to information about a provided evacuation plan. Furthermore, having a pre-existing personal evacuation plan and being provided with one by the authorities act as substitutes.

We extend the literature on competitive behaviour by investigating environments in which the choice to compete is not made by an individual themselves, but by someone else. Choosing on behalf of others is an integral part of life and gender may be an important factor in shaping the perceived suitability of individuals for career promotions in competitive environments. We assign subjects either the role of an agent or a principal in an experiment. Agents perform a real effort task and a randomly assigned principal chooses whether the agent performs under a piece rate or tournament incentive scheme. Before making a decision for the agent, we vary whether the principal is informed about the agent's gender or not. Regardless of whether gender is revealed, we find no gender gap in competitiveness when principals are choosing for agents. In terms of determinants of the principals' choices, we observe that expectations about their agent's performance, as well as the principal's own preferences for risk and competitiveness matter for the decision to make others compete. In addition, we replicate existing results reporting that women are less willing to enter the tournament than men when choosing themselves. We compare both decision environments and show that efficiency (defined as average performance and earnings) does not suffer, whereas the winners' performance is lower when principals decide for agents. Taken together, our results suggest that allowing others to decide has the potential to increase the representation of women in competitive situations, many of which resemble the labour market. 

 In a setting where inequality is in-built (battle of the sexes), we investigate whether subjects condition their behaviour on the gender of their co-player. In order to identify the role of culture and gender norms, we run the experiment in two countries, Norway and India, characterised by very different levels of gender inequality. We find different patterns of gender effects in the two countries. In India, subjects are more `hawkish' when facing a woman. This occurs only for lower education subjects and is observed primarily in female participants. Highly educated Indian participants do not discriminate between male and female co-players. In Norway, the gender effect is the opposite of what observed in India:  it is present only in highly educated male participants, and takes the form of subjects becoming more `hawkish' when facing a man.  Our evidence suggests that these gender effects may be due to subjects experiencing different levels of  inequality aversion depending on the gender of their co-player, in a manner that is mediated by their culture and gender norms.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy appears sharply divided along political lines. The aim of this project is to quantitatively assess to what degree vaccine hesitancy is driven by a lack of information on COVID-19 and its vaccines, and to what degree it is driven by politically motivated reasoning and exposure to abundant misinformation. Using a large-scale randomized control trial, we test scalable interventions to combat misinformation and potentially biased reasoning on vaccination. Ultimately, we hope to deliver communication tools that allow healthcare providers to identify which individuals will be receptive to good-faith conversations on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination as well as productively engage those who are otherwise determined to reject any information that is perceived to be pro-vaccination. Our approach adapts the communication tools of "Paradoxical Reasoning" which were developed to unfreeze entrenched beliefs in the context of the most intractable conflicts (e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian border conflict).