Assistant Professor (Organizational Economics)
University of Cologne
Associate Member of ECONtribute, C-SEB
I am a behavioral economist. I combine applied theory and experiments to study how cognitive biases, group identities, and social incentives shape behavior, beliefs, and institutional outcomes in organizations and markets.
My recent work centers on group image concerns, figleafing, and gender bias in performance evaluations.
arno.apf@gmail.com
apffelstaedt@wiso.uni-koeln.de
Publications
Spontaneous Discrimination with Endogenous Information Disclosure (single-authored)
Journal of Economic Theory (2025)
How can discrimination persist without prejudice or statistical differences? This paper extends the idea of spontaneous discrimination (Peski and Szentes, AER 2013) by showing how competition gives individuals incentives to disclose who they and others interacted with, thereby sustaining discriminatory norms under endogenous information disclosure.
link to journal site (open access), pdf (accepted working paper version)
Corrupted Votes and Rule Compliance (with Jana Freundt)
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics (2024)
Allegations of voter fraud accompany many real-world elections. How does electoral malpractice affect the acceptance of elected institutions? Using an online experiment in which people distribute income according to majority-elected rules, we show that those who experience vote buying or voter disenfranchisement during the election are subsequently less likely to comply with a rule.
pdf (accepted working paper version), older version (2022): ECONtribute Discussion Paper No. 137
When preferences are sensitive to context, firms may influence purchase decisions by designing the environment of consumption choices. This paper studies how competitive retailers optimally design their product line if preferences at the store depend on whether the choice set draws consumer attention to the quality or price of a product.
pdf (accepted working paper version); older version with additional analyses on partial naïveté
Social Norms and Elections: How elected rules can make behavior (in)appropriate (with Jana Freundt and Christoph Oslislo)
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2022)
Can elections change people’s ideas about what is ethically right and what is wrong? A number of recent observations suggest that social norms can change rapidly as a result of election outcomes. We explore this conjecture using a controlled online experiment.
link to journal site (open access), older version (2021): ECONtribute Discussion Paper No. 068
Working Papers
Group Image Concerns (with Gönül Dogan and Fabian Hoffmann)
We introduce the study of group image concerns, showing that people intrinsically value their group’s reputation and express both group pride and group shame. Across various domains (generosity, intelligence, patriotism) and group identities (religion, university, political affiliation), individuals engage in costly signaling to improve their group’s image and selectively pay to reveal or conceal fellow members’ behavior depending on whether it reflects well or poorly on the group.
pdf (Nov 2024); ECONtribute Discussion Paper No. 324 (July 2024); presentation slides
Figleafing and Self-Serving Behavior (with Bernd Irlenbusch, Jan-Erik Lönnqvist, and Gari Walkowitz)
Decisions perceived as self-serving often involve claims that responsibility lies with an unbiased entity—like an advisor, court, or election outcome—to whom authority was delegated. In many cases, these claims are non-verifiable, arousing suspicion that they are nothing more than a "fig leaf" for selfish behaviors. We address this suspicion using a series of experiments, showing that "figleafing" is common and that the option to do so strongly discourages prosocial behavior.
new version in progress (old draft available on request), presentation slides
Selected Work in Progress
Shocking Belief Systems
(with Eugenio Verrina)
Winning Stories: Persuasive Narratives and (Gender) Biases at Work
(with Lydia Mechtenberg)
Talent or Effort? Gender Effects when Attributing Success to Ability vs Hard Work
(with Max Thon)
Hibernating Projects
Cooperative Decisions when Consequences are Delayed
(with Arne Pieters), draft available on request
Time-Inconsistent Prosocial Motives?
(with Marco Islam)
Writings Outside Economics
Quantitative Assessment of Technology Impact on Aviation Fuel Efficiency
(with Peter Nolte and Volker Gollnick)
Air Transport and Operations (2012)
Technology Screening, Selection and Modelling for an Environmentally Sustainable Aviation
(with Peter Nolte, Thomas Zill, Eike Stumpf, Stephane Dufresne, Simon Briceno, Christopher Raczynksi, and Thomas Rötger)
Proceedings of the 11th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference (2011)