Research

Abraham, D., Greiner, B., & Stephanides, M. (2023). On the Internet you can be anyone: An experiment on strategic avatar choice in online marketplaces. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 206, 251-261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.11.033

Abraham, D., Corazzini, L., Fišar, M., & Reggiani, T. (2023). Coordinating donations via an intermediary: The destructive effect of a sunk overhead cost. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 211, 287-304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.05.006  

Working Papers

"The hidden costs of enforcing minimum contributions to a global public good" (with Katarína Glejtková and Ondřej Krčál). R&R at Ecological Economics link

"Motivational Effects of Feeling Trusted" (with Ondřej Krčál) link

We investigate whether feeling trusted or distrusted by a manager affects the motivation to work. In a laboratory experiment, responsibility for a manager’s earnings is divided unequally between two workers. We vary whether this responsibility allocation decision is made by the manager, or by a random device on the manager’s behalf. Importantly, being assigned more or less responsibility for the manager's payoff does not change the workers' wages. Despite this, we find that workers provide less effort when they are intentionally, as opposed to randomly, assigned a lower level of responsibility. This negative effect is mediated by the workers' emotional response when learning that the manager chose to place her trust in the other worker. We find no positive effect of being trusted. Our results demonstrate that managerial decisions do not need to have payoff consequences in order to affect workers' motivation and effort choices

"Rethinking the measurement of trust and altruism in standard games" link

I design a trust game in which trust is expressed solely as the intention to become vulnerable to another based on positive expectations about their behavior. The resulting game is essentially a variant of the dictator game in which dictators also have the option of expropriating some of the recipient's endowment for themselves. Potential recipients in this game choose whether they want to engage in the game, thereby trusting the dictator not to take from them, or stay out of it, in which case the game ends and both players receive their initial endowments. In different treatments, I vary whether the recipient’s entry is voluntary or determined by a random device. I find that while recipients believe their voluntary entry into the game constitutes an act of trust, dictators are not more altruistic in this treatment relative to the random-entry treatment, indicating that the recipient’s intention to trust does not trigger a positive reciprocal response. Using symmetric treatments without take options for the dictator, I also show that permitting recipients to opt out of the dictator game reduces the sensitivity of dictators' giving behavior to their (experimenter-determined) choice set. I conclude that this recipient opt-in feature helps make the dictator game less abstract and more conducive to the measurement of altruistic preferences.

"Does Discrimination Beget Discrimination? The Effect of Exclusion on Ingroup Bias" (with Astrid Hopfensitz) link

We examine whether being included or excluded can create a focal identity dimension that forms the basis for subsequent discrimination. Using a version of the minimal group paradigm, we induce two artificial identities and create a situation in which one participant in every 3-member team is excluded from the team based on their identity profile and forced to work alone. The other two (included) members of the team work together. We find that while there is no effect on excluded participants, the included members of the team exhibit greater ingroup bias on the identity dimension that formed the basis for their inclusion (i.e., the included identity dimension) over the identity dimension that played no role in their inclusion. Relative to participants in a baseline condition who experienced neither exclusion nor inclusion, we find suggestive evidence that included participants are more likely to choose to interact with those who share their identity on the included dimension. They further report feeling closer to their ingroup on this dimension over the other. Our results indicate that being included creates a focal identity that affects the individual's subsequent choices and behavior.

Work-in-Progress

"Upstream Corrections and Team Performance" (with Maria Policiuc)