Why are high monetary payments prohibited for certain goods, thereby causing shortages in their supply? I conduct a framed field experiment with a general population sample, and a survey experiment with this sample and with ethics committees. In the experiment, participants can prohibit others from being offered money to register as stem-cell donors. I document that, whereas the majority of participants do not respond to changes in the incentives (63%) or become more in favor of the offer with higher incentives (20%), a minority of 17% prohibit high incentives. I show that this minority wants to protect individuals who are persuaded by high incentives. I also show that a lottery scheme reduces their objections to high incentives. Finally, I document that the public is much more supportive of high incentives than are ethics committees.

A normative conflict arises when individuals derive different benefits from cooperation. We analyze experimental data from three published studies to investigate the impact of normative conflict on the cooperative behavior of men and women. We find that women exhibit significantly lower levels of cooperation in the presence of normative conflict. We observe no significant gender differences in cooperation in the absence of normative conflict.

With the help of more than 700 reviewers we assess the reproducibility of nearly 500 articles published in the journal Management Science before and after the introduction of a new Data and Code Disclosure policy in 2019. When considering only articles for which data accessibility and hard- and software requirements were not an obstacle for reviewers, the results of more than 95% of articles under the new disclosure policy could be fully or largely computationally reproduced. However, for 29% of articles at least part of the dataset was not accessible to the reviewer. Considering all articles in our sample reduces the share of reproduced articles to 68%. These figures represent a significant increase compared to the period before the introduction of the disclosure policy, where only 12% of articles voluntarily provided replication materials, out of which 55% could be (largely) reproduced. Substantial heterogeneity in reproducibility rates across different fields is mainly driven by differences in dataset accessibility. Other reasons for unsuccessful reproduction attempts include missing code, unresolvable code errors, weak or missing documentation, but also soft- and hardware requirements and code complexity.  Our findings highlight the importance of journal code and data disclosure policies, and suggest potential avenues for enhancing their effectiveness.

Gender segregation could be the result of perceived job-specific productivity differences between men and women or the belief that homogeneous teams perform better. We investigate these explanations in two samples: students and personnel managers. In both samples, we find that women are picked more often for the stereotypically female task and men more often for the stereotypically male task. Subjects believe that gender-diverse teams perform better, especially in the task with complementarities.

Altruistic punishment is thought to be a major enforcement mechanism of social norms. I present experimental results from a modified version of the dictator game with third-party punishment, in which third parties can remain ignorant about the choice of the dictator. I find that a substantial fraction of subjects choose not to reveal the dictator’s choice and not to punish the dictator. As a result, altruistic punishment is significantly lower when the dictator’s choice is initially hidden.

In a 2013 Psychological Science article, Hsee et al. designed a controlled laboratory experiment to assess whether individuals overearn, i.e., forgo leisure to work and earn beyond their consumption needs. The authors reported evidence in line with people overearning, even at the cost of happiness, and in line with mindless accumulation being the driver of this finding. In a large-scale replication and extension of Hsee et al. (2013), we cannot confirm the original paper’s findings: Our results reject that mindless accumulation is a quantitatively relevant driver of overearning behavior. In direct replications of Hsee et al. (2013), overearning turns out to be a moderate phenomenon. Extensions to the original paper, however, suggest that task enjoyment and uncertainty about future utility of consumption may establish overearning.

We investigate gender discrimination in a nationally-representative sample of German firms using a factorial survey design. Short CVs of fictitious applicants for apprenticeship positions are presented to human resource managers who are asked to evaluate the applicants. Women are evaluated worse than men on average, controlling for all attributes of the CV. This measure of discrimination is robust to differences in the variance of unobservable productivity characteristics (“Heckman critique”). Controlling for all occupation- and firm-related variables that we observe, only the share of women in an occupation correlates with discrimination. 

An extensive literature documents that people are willing to sacrifice personal material gain to adhere to a moral motive. However, less is known about the psychological mechanisms that operate when two moral motives come into conflict. We hypothesize that individuals adhere to the moral motive that aligns with their self-interest. We test this hypothesis using experiments that induce a conflict between two of the most-studied moral motives: fairness and truth-telling. Consistent with our hypothesis and across experiments, our results show that individuals do prefer to adhere to the moral motive that is more aligned with their self-interest. 

Women are underrepresented in most competitive environments. We provide evidence of a potential driver of this observation: biased beliefs about a gender difference concerning selection into competition. Our study consists of two experiments, a worker and an employer experiment. Participants in the worker experiment choose to enter a competition in a task in which women and men perform equally well. We elicit the beliefs of participants in the employer experiment about the productivity of the participants in the worker experiment depending on their gender and competition entry choice. We show that people believe that the productivity gap between competing and non-competing individuals is substantially larger for men even though they hold similar prior beliefs about the productivity of women and men, and despite the actual productivity gap between competing and non-competing participants being similar for both genders. As a consequence, participants believe that competing men outperform competing women. We also show that introducing a gender quota, next to increasing female competition entry, increases the accuracy of beliefs about selection into competition. The quota reduces the expected productivity gap between competing and non-competing men. The quota does not affect the expected productivity of competing women. We therefore provide evidence of an additional benefit of gender quotas.

Monetary incentives have long been a cornerstone of economic experiments. However, unincentivized measures of economic preferences and skills are becoming more common as experimenters move beyond the lab to study general population samples. This paper examines how monetary incentives influence inferences about truth-telling, competitiveness, and cognitive skills using a large, nationally representative U.S. sample. We find that incentives substantially alter the levels and patterns of truth-telling, competitiveness, and cognitive skills and increase the time participants spend reading instructions and making decisions. Crucially, in numerous instances, monetary incentives affect the conclusions derived from the data concerning group differences (e.g., age groups, gender, income groups, and educational attainment) as well as the estimated associations between income and the measured preferences/skills.