Publications
Abraham, D., Glejtková, K., & Krčál, O. (2025). The hidden costs of imposing minimum contributions to a global public good. Ecological Economics, 227, 108346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108346
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
"Motivational Effects of Feeling Trusted" (with Ondřej Krčál) link. R&R at The Leadership Quarterly.
We investigate how workers’ motivation is influenced by whether they feel trusted by leaders. In a laboratory experiment, responsibility for a manager’s earnings is divided unequally between two workers. We vary whether this decision is made by the manager or a random device on the manager’s behalf. Importantly, having more/less responsibility does not affect workers’ wages. Despite this, we find workers provide less effort when they are deliberately, vs. randomly, assigned lower responsibility. We find no positive effect of being trusted (i.e., being deliberately assigned more responsibility). We examine potential mechanisms and show that both beliefs about expected effort as well as negative emotions when learning about the manager's decision can explain our main treatment effect.
"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 a variant of the well-known 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 dictators are not more altruistic when recipients enter voluntarily even though recipients believe their entry constitutes an act of trust. Using symmetric treatments without take options for the dictator, I show that introducing this opt-in for the recipient reduces the sensitivity of dictator giving to the inclusion of take options in their choice set. Thus while the recipient opt-in feature does not trigger a trustworthy response from the dictator, the results indicate that it makes the dictator game 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 in or excluded from a group based on a given dimension of one's identity increases the salience of this identity dimension in two unrelated interactions. Using a laboratory experiment, we induce two ex-ante equally relevant dimensions of identity and have one member of a three-member team excluded, ostensibly because they do not share a given dimension of their identity with the other two (included) members of the team. We subsequently measure ingroup bias of all participants on both identity dimensions using a disinterested dictator game. We find that while there is no effect of exclusion, being included increases ingroup bias on the identity dimension that was the basis for inclusion. Included individuals are also more likely to want to interact with those who share their identity on the included dimension relative to participants in a separate baseline condition. These results suggest that being included calls more attention to the aspect of one's identity that was the basis for inclusion resulting in stronger ingroup bias on this dimension.
Selected Work-in-Progress
"Upstream Corrections and Team Performance" (with Maria Polipciuc and Oliver Kirchkamp)
"Institutional Factors and the Extraction of Limited Health Resources" (with Jonathan Stäbler and Ondřej Krčál)
Other
Fišar, M., Greiner, B., Huber, C., Katok, E., Ozkes, A. I., & Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration. (2024). Reproducibility in Management Science. Management Science, 70(3), 1343-1356. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03556
Note: Member of the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration