My Research in a "Hatshell": 

Abstract: We examine the relationship between confidence in own absolute performance and risk attitudes using two confidence elicitation procedures: self-reported (non-incentivised) confidence and an incentivised procedure that elicits the certainty equivalent of a bet based on performance. The former procedure reproduces the “hard-easy effect” (underconfidence in easy tasks and overconfidence in hard tasks) found in a large number of studies using non-incentivised self-reports. The latter procedure produces general underconfidence, which is significantly reduced, but not eliminated when we filter out the effects of risk attitudes. Finally, we find that self-reported confidence correlates significantly with features of individual risk attitudes including parameters of individual probability weighting.

Abstract:  We investigate the possibility of group discussion serving as an implicit information channel to eliminate biased entry decisions into experimental markets. We find that groups are more informed than individuals in their beliefs. Nevertheless they make similarly biased  market entry decisions failing to learn from feedback and repetition.

Abstract: Employees typically have to work on multiple tasks that require unrelated skill sets. While past research strongly supports that feedback influences beliefs and preferences within same tasks, little is known about effects of feedback across dissimilar tasks. In a novel laboratory experiment using two unrelated real effort tasks, we find that feedback of relative performance in the first task causally affects confidence beliefs and preferences for comparative pay in the second task. Our data also exhibit differential effects of feedback on women’s and men’s preferences, which help close the pre-existing gender gap in preferences. Analysis of economic efficiency shows that negative feedback in the first task improves "would-be" payoffs of low performing subjects in the second task by discouraging them from choosing the comparative pay option. The results have important implications for organizations to understand both the powers and the limitations of using relative performance feedback as intervention policies.

Abstract: People who compete alone may entertain different psychological motivations from those who compete for a team.  Using a real-effort experiment, we aim to discover the psychological effects of the team situation on individual behaviour absent of the additional strategic interdependence and uncertainty among team members. We exploit a dynamic pairwise team contest in which the strategic uncertainties among team members play a minimised role in individual rational behaviour; and we create strategically-equivalent individual contests to isolate the pure psychological effects of team situation on individual competitive behaviour. We find that behaviour in individual contests and in sterile team contests follows a psychological momentum effect in which leaders work harder than trailers. In contrast, in team contests enriched with inter-team communication, behaviour follows strategic neutrality. We discuss the implications of our results for theoretical modelling of contests and practical implications for the optimal design of team incentive schemes and personnel management.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate whether uninformative relative performance feedback snowballs confidence and causes confidence biases in beliefs. We study elicited confidence beliefs of subjects relative to their group members in three stages. After each stage subjects receive relative performance feedback and are re-grouped with other subjects who have received a similar feedback. We manipulate the difficulty of the task they are performing to test whether the pattern of confidence snowballing depends on absolute levels of performance. We find that subjects’ confidence snowballs in the direction of the feedback received such that positive feedback results in overconfidence and negative feedback results in underconfidence but only in the case of difficult task. We test for alternative explanations for confidence snowballing observed in our data and find that reference group neglect hypotheses developed by Camerer and Lovallo (1999) explains most of our results better than any other mechanism.

 Abstract: This paper investigates the behavioural effects of competitive, social and image incentives on men’s and women’s allocation of effort in a multitask environment. Specifically, using two real-effort laboratory tasks, we investigate how competitive prizes, social value generation and public awards affect effort allocation decisions between the tasks. We find that all three types of incentives significantdistortion lies with competitive incentives, which is due to the effort allocation decision of men. Women exert similar amount of effort ly focus effort allocation towards the task they are applied in, but the effect varies significantly between men and women. The highest effort across the three incentive conditions, with slightly lower effort levels in the social-image incentivized tasks. Our results inform how and why genders differences may persist in competitive workplaces.