Research

Publications


We perform a controlled experiment to study the welfare effects of competition within a strategic communication environment. Two equally informed senders with conflicting interests can misreport information at a cost. We compare a treatment where only one sender communicates to a treatment where both senders privately communicate with a decision-maker, all else equal. Data show that competition fails to improve decision-making and harms senders' welfare. As a result, the overall market welfare is significantly lower under competition. In both treatments, senders reveal less information, and decision-makers obtain less than the most informative equilibria predict. However, they still reveal and get more information compared to other equilibria.
This paper investigates to what extent laboratory measures of cheating generalise to the field. To this purpose, we develop a lab measure that allows for individual level observations of cheating whilst reducing the likelihood that participants feel observed. Decisions made in this laboratory task are then compared to individual choices taken in the field, where subjects can lie by misreporting their experimental earnings. We use two field variations that differ in the degree of anonymity of the field decision. According to our measure, no correlation of behaviour between the laboratory and the field is found. We then perform the same analysis using a lab measure that can only detect cheating at the aggregate level. In this case, we do find a weak correlation between the two environments. We discuss the signicance and interpretation of these results.
Theoretical and experimental literature have provided mixed insights on the ability of  financial markets to perfectly aggregate private information into asset prices. We conduct an experiment designed to benchmark information aggregation in markets. In our lab experiment we randomly assign subjects to different institutional environments, either a market or a BDM (Becker-DeGroot-Marschak) mechanism. We  find evidence that market interaction worsens the aggregation process. The difference between the two environments is driven by price-insensitive traders who seem unable to learn from market prices. Price-sensitive traders, by contrast, learn equally well in both environments.

Working papers & work in progress


Across the social sciences researchers have debated the impact income inequality has on people’s perceptions, specifically on attribution and social trust. In this paper we use a combination of surveys and behavioral lab experiments to identify a causal impact of inequality on attribution and social trust. We find that higher relative position has a positive impact on belief in meritocracy and social trust, which we causally identify both using a novel incentivized lab task as well as standard survey measures. These results are in line with correlational associations we find using larger general surveys. By highlighting these consequences of inequality the results provide useful insights for the design of policy aimed at breaking the persistence of inequality.