Christoph Drobner

Motivated Risk Assessments joint with Marco Islam
Forthcoming at The Economic Journal

Do people form risk assessments to justify their actions? We investigate this question in a field experiment studying the dynamics of risk assessments for visiting a café during the COVID-19 pandemic. By randomly varying the incentive for a visit, we find that participants with a high incentive visit cafés more often and downplay the risk compared to those participants with a low incentive. Importantly, the downplaying happens in anticipation of the visit and without new information, suggesting that the assessment update justifies engagement in risky behavior. This finding is inconsistent with Bayesian updating but consistent with the notion of motivated reasoning.

Motivated Belief Updating and Rationalization of Information joint with Sebastian J. Goerg

Management Science, 2024, 70 (7), 4583–4592.

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.

Misguided Effort (June 2025, R&R at The Economic Journal)

with A. Yeşim Orhun

We experimentally study how miscalibrated prior beliefs about one's own ability affect effort provision through misguided inferences about returns to effort. We demonstrate 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 their own ability and external fundamentals. Crucially, we establish that misguided inferences lead to suboptimal future effort provision. These findings provide causal evidence for a theorized effect of miscalibrated prior beliefs on economic actions that operates through misguided inferences about the economic environment.

Real Incentives Really Matter (July 2026, Conditionally Accepted at Experimental Economics)

with Sebastian J. Goerg and Orestis Kopsacheilis

Incentivizing behavior, a core principle of economic experiments, is currently under scrutiny due to a series of papers that find little to no difference in choices made under real or hypothetical incentives. We experimentally assess the effectiveness of hypothetical incentives to induce participants’ real effort – an integral aspect of reliable experimental data. We find that although linking behavior to hypothetical incentives generates modest additional effort compared to no reference to such incentives, hypothetical incentives fall substantially short of real ones, even when their nominal value is radically inflated. To understand the mechanism behind these effects, we systematically vary base pay and piece-rate magnitudes across incentive conditions and structurally estimate a model of costly effort. Although higher base pay increases effort both by increasing non-pecuniary motivation and by enhancing responsiveness to hypothetical incentives, incentive-compatible real payments are far more cost-effective. 

Fifty-five Crowd-Sourced Designs Assessing Carbon Pricing Support (June 2026, Conditionally Accepted at Nature Human Behavior), Interactive dashboard

Many designs project with Esther Blanco, Armando Holzknecht, Jürgen Huber, Michael Kirchler, Rene Schwaiger and Co-Authors

A carbon price is an effective and cost-efficient policy to mitigate emissions, yet low public acceptance and limited political support remain major barriers to its widespread implementation. This crowd-sourced “many-designs” project presents results from 55 behavioral interventions on real-world support for carbon pricing, independently developed by international research teams. By implementing the interventions simultaneously with almost 20,000 U.S. residents, this pre-registered study shows very small positive but statistically significant effects of behavioral interventions on real-world support, and stated support, including the willingness to endorse a carbon price that internalizes the social costs of $120 per ton of CO2 emissions (Cohen’s d’s: 0.04–0.08; between 1.1–2.4 percentage points in increased support across outcomes). Furthermore, the results reveal low-to-medium between-study heterogeneity. Lastly, we identify strong overconfidence among research teams regarding the expected effects of their interventions and those of their peers, indicating a miscalibration of community expectations.

Raising carbon footprint awareness can reduce climate-friendly behavior (August 2026)

with Sebastian J. Goerg and Michael Kurschilgen

Carbon-footprint calculators are increasingly used to raise awareness of personal emissions and encourage climate-friendly consumption. In a preregistered online experiment with a representative sample of 2,411 German adults, we assigned participants to a control group or one of five treatments of increasing carbon-footprint salience, ranging from merely completing a carbon-footprint calculator and assessing one's own footprint to additionally receiving absolute feedback, a peer ranking, visual cues, and normative labels. Climate-friendly behavior was measured with an incentivized task carrying real financial and environmental consequences. Contrary to our prediction, the treatments backfired, reducing climate-friendly behavior by approximately 12%. The decline was already present after mere self-assessment, and additional information neither amplified nor eliminated it. This finding suggests that the trigger was taking stock of one's consumption, rather than the explicit feedback that followed. The backfire was concentrated among low-footprint participants; high emitters, who offer the greatest mitigation potential, were unaffected.

High stakes, more mistakes? Belief elicitation and incentives (January 2025)

with Boon Han Koh, Alexander Coutts, and Christopher Woolnough

Accurate belief elicitation is central to applied economics, prompting extensive efforts to develop incentive-compatible methods. Although financial incentives are typically recommended to improve reporting accuracy, little is known about how the magnitude of these incentives — or their interaction with the level of instruction detail — shapes belief reports. Our survey of researchers suggests that researchers tend to prefer using higher incentives. However, we observe in our laboratory experiment a 33% increase in error in belief reports when financial incentives under the BSR are increased by 10-fold, and this effect is independent of the level of instruction detail. Moreover, we find that this effect is driven by individuals with low cognitive reflection performance. Taken together, our findings suggest that using lower financial incentives in belief-elicitation procedures is preferable.