Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

1. Pittnauer, S., Hohnisch, M., Ostermaier, A., & Pfingsten, A. 2023. Effects of social information on risk taking and performance: Understanding others' decisions versus comparing oneself with others in short-term performance. Organization Science 34(6), 2352–2372.

Synopsis: The paper is about integration of social information in individuals. It demonstrates that individuals are able to profit from information about others’ decisions even if this information does not infer any new objective information about the problem. It is noteworthy that this type of social learning is not acknowledged in the standard economic models of social learning. However, information about others’ decisions may have the opposite effect if participants come to compare with each other in terms of short-term performance. The effect depends on the organization of the information flows and is explained by Construal Level Theory. 

2. Pittnauer, S., & Hohnisch, M. 2023. Observing the Creation of New Knowledge in the Economics Laboratory—Do Participants Discover How to Learn from Outcome Feedback in a Dynamic Decision Problem? Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 215, 382–405.

Synopsis: The paper makes two contributions. First, it documents direct observation of cognitive innovation: a small portion of participants create a new learning procedure that allows them to approximate the optimal policy of a relatively complex dynamic decision problem. In line with the heuristic method, this learning procedure involves a simplification of the search space and the application of domain-general learning rules to this simplified space. A surprising finding is that even though about half of the participants produce the key feature of the learning procedure—several steady states of the dynamical system—very high monetary incentives are unable to increase the portion of participants who realize the full potential of the learning procedure. Second, the paper offers a task that can serve as a workhorse for experimental designs on how to promote cognitive innovation in organizations.

3. Hohnisch, M., Pittnauer, S., Selten, R., & Pfingsten, A. 2016. Designing for deliberative goal-based decision making in environments with rare adverse events—An experimental study. Organization Science 27(6), 1417–1434.

Synopsis: The paper demonstrates that a computerized goal-based decision elicitation format improves the performance of decision makers. The goal-based format offers a comprehensive set of dimensions in terms of which the problem may be contemplated and economizes on cognitive resources for simulating in the mind various tradeoffs in terms of these dimensions. Importantly, the goal-based format does not do any of the following: (1) provide information beyond what is computable on the basis of the task instructions using elementary algebra; (2) provide any information on what the “optimal” policy is; (3) nudge participants towards any specific policy. Instead, key to its effectiveness is that it prompts and enables participants to think integratively about safety and short-term profit goals. The goal-based format mimics more structured decision processes in organizations.

4. Hohnisch, M., Pittnauer, S., Selten, R., Pfingsten, A., & Eraßmy, J. 2014. Gender differences in decisions under profound uncertainty are non-robust to the availability of information on equally informed others’ decisions. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 108(December), 40–58.

Synopsis: This paper adds another piece of evidence to the already overwhelming case against context-independent risk preferences. Our results reveal that the relative "riskiness" of individual decisions made by participants who had identified themselves as 'male' or 'female' depended on whether the decisions were taken with or without the information about two other participants' decisions (who jointly made up an "observation group" throughout the experiment). This happened although the information provided does not reveal any new information (beyond the information provided in the instructions) that is decision-relevant under standard risk-preference perspectives. The results support a problem-solving perspective to understand decisions under uncertainty.

5. Selten, R., Pittnauer, S., & Hohnisch, M. 2012. Dealing with dynamic decision problems when knowledge of the environment is limited: An approach based on goal systems. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 25, 443–457.

6. Hohnisch, M., Pittnauer, S., & Stauffer, D. 2008. A percolation-based model explaining delayed takeoff in new-product diffusion. Industrial and Corporate Change 17(5), 1001–1017.

7. Stauffer, D., Hohnisch, M., & Pittnauer, S. 2006. The coevolution of individual economic characteristics and socioeconomic networks. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 370(2), 734–740.

8. Hohnisch, M., Pittnauer, S., Solomon, S., & Stauffer, D. 2005. Socioeconomic interaction and swings in business confidence indicators. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 345(3), 646–656.

9. Hohnisch, M., Pittnauer, S., & Chakrabarty, M. 2002. Empirical regularities in distributions of individual consumption expenditure. International Journal of Modern Physics C, 13(4), 541–549.