Christoph Drobner

Welcome! I am a PhD student in Economics at the Technical University Munich.

My main research interest lies in the field of behavioral and experimental economics with a focus on the interaction of preferences and beliefs in the decision-making process.

You can download my CV here.

Publications

Motivated Belief Updating and Rationalization of Information Forthcoming at Management Science

with Sebastian J. Goerg

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating the perceived ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects substantially overweight positive information relative to negative information because they derive direct utility from holding positive beliefs. This finding provides a behavioral explanation why and how overconfidence can evolve in the presence of objective information. Moreover, we document that subjects, who receive more negative information, downplay the ego-relevance of the task. Taken together, these findings suggest that subjects use two alternative strategies to protect their ego when presented with objective information.

Motivated Beliefs and Anticipation of Uncertainty Resolution

American Economic Review: Insights, 2022, 4 (1), 89-105.

Manipulating subjects' expectations about the resolution of uncertainty, I show that subjects update beliefs about ego-relevant information optimistically when they expect no resolution of uncertainty but neutrally when they expect immediate uncertainty resolution. This finding highlights an important channel of the supply side of motivated beliefs and informs the discussion about the puzzling evidence on belief updating about ego-relevant information. Moreover, I document that subjects expost rationalize information by manipulating their stated beliefs about the ego-relevance of the underlying event depending on the valence of information. This result suggests an additional channel that subjects use to protect their ego utility. 

Working papers

Misguided Effort (new!)

with A. Yeşim Orhun

We study how miscalibrated prior beliefs about one’s own ability affect effort provision through misguided learning about returns to effort. We show that both overconfident and underconfident individuals draw misguided inferences about the returns to effort when observing initial labor market outcomes that are jointly determined by one’s own ability and external luck. Importantly, we further show that this misguided learning process leads to suboptimal effort provision in the future. These results provide the first causal empirical support for a theorized effect of miscalibrated prior beliefs on economic actions that operates solely through misguided learning about the economic environment.

Greenwashing Your Personality Under Review

with Fabienne Cantner and Sebastian J. Goerg

Behaving more sustainable has been shown to signal cooperativeness in social dilemmas. We investigate whether people exploit this apparent signaling value by inflating their intention to behave sustainably without changing their actual behavior. We explore this question in an online experiment in which participants self-report the importance of sustainability in their daily lives before engaging in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Using a between-subjects design, we manipulate whether participants have the opportunity to adjust their self-reported sustainability scores after receiving instructions for the game. The results show that almost 30% of participants increase their sustainability scores in anticipation of higher transfers from their matched partners. However, this greenwashing strategy proves to be unsuccessful, as higher sustainability scores do not lead to higher transfers.

Work in progress

Beliefs Elicitation under Ambiguity 

with Boon Han Koh and Alexander Coutts

Carbon Beliefs 

with Michael Kurschilgen and Sebastian J. Goerg

Beliefs about Contracts and Productivity 

with A. Yeşim Orhun