with Eve-Angéline Lambert and Sébastien Massoni
Abstract. This paper experimentally studies environmental whistleblowing by jointly examining the three actors involved in enforcement: managers who may engage in misconduct, employees who can report it, and citizens who can monitor it externally. We compare five experimental conditions varying reporting incentives and external monitoring. Our results show that monetary rewards increase reporting, while external monitoring deters misconduct by increasing the probability of detection. Yet rewards and fines for silent employees do not deter fraud despite raising its theoretical detection risk, and fine and public recognition regimes may even increase misconduct.
with Eve-Angéline Lambert and Sébastien Massoni
Abstract. Environmental liability can only promote prevention if firms cannot circumvent enforcement, yet polluting firms may lobby to reduce their regulatory exposure. This paper provides causal evidence on how the timing of lobbying access, before or after environmental damage occurs, shapes the tradeoff between prevention and liability avoidance. Using an online experiment in which participants take the role of a polluting firm strictly liable for environmental damage, we find that ex ante lobbying crowds out prevention, whereas ex post lobbying leaves prevention unchanged. The results identify the timing of lobbying access as an important institutional design choice in environmental liability regimes.
(Draft in progress)
Abstract. Most experimental work treats whistleblowing as a trade-off between the reporter's personal cost and the pursuit of justice. Real-world cases, however, show that reporting may also harm colleagues who were not involved in the misconduct, creating a social dilemma between addressing the harm suffered by victims and shielding innocent peers. In a preregistered online experiment, I introduce peer spillovers into a whistleblowing game and examine whether monetary rewards can offset the resulting reluctance to report. Peer spillovers discourage reporting, while monetary rewards eliminate this effect and restore reporting to the level observed when colleagues are unaffected. Reporting is not significantly affected when it prevents future misconduct without compensating victims for their initial losses, suggesting that employees are motivated not only by repairing harm, but also by stopping or sanctioning wrongdoing.
with Pedro Gonzalez-Fernandez, Karl Hauser, and Valeria Fanghella
(Replication report submitted)
Replication of “Predictable Effects of Visual Salience in Experimental Decisions and Games,” published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, conducted within the Institute for Replication (I4R).