Falling and failing (to learn): Evidence from a Nation-Wide Cybersecurity Field Experiment with SMEs with Aurelien Baillon, Francesco Capozza, Thomas Dirkmaat, Amber Druten & Evelien van der veer . Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Volume 230, February 2025, 106868
Prior experiences are crucial in shaping risk prevention behavior. Previous studies have shown that experiencing a simulated phishing attack (a ``phishing drill") reduces the likelihood of clicking on unsafe links and disclosing one's password. In a large field experiment involving 670 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their 33,000 employees, we examined the impact of experience on individuals' ability to detect cyber-security threats, and whether this effect persisted over several months. We collected data at both the company and individual levels, including risk preference, time preference, and trust. Our findings indicate only a non-systematic, short-term effect of previous phishing emails on clicking behavior. A cluster of individuals with greater patience, trust, and risk seeking was the most likely to benefit from phishing drills.
Learning Gaps? Attitudes and Beliefs Under Described and Experienced Signals
We show that ambiguity attitudes vary systematically with the informativeness of signals. In an experiment varying the strength of signal-event associations, we separate ambiguity attitudes from beliefs within the same choices. When associations must be inferred from sampling (experience), aversion decreases as signals become informative; when associations are fully known (description), aversion shows no response. Insensitivity declines under the strongest signal in both settings, though the evidence is weaker when the association is known. For the analysis of beliefs, the separation proves consequential: raw measures indicate underreaction to information of similar size in both settings, whereas corrected beliefs, unless the assumed priors favor extreme distributions, respond more strongly to the signal under experience than under description. In contrast with the common finding of conservatism in the belief-updating literature, evidence for underreaction is weak and confined to description.
A simple betting rule to incentivize the elicitation of continuous distributions With Aurelien Baillon and Thomas de Haan.
We introduce an incentive mechanism, call a betting rule, to elicit continuous distribution. We show it is behaviorally proper, in the sense that it provides incentives to report accurate beliefs even for non-expected utility maximizers and it is transparent and easy to understand.
The cost of going against the tide: the effect of stereotypes on ambiguity attitudes with Cedric Gutierrez, Marine Hainguerlot and Chen Li.
We investigated whether people's ambiguity attitudes and beliefs about others' competence depend on the stereotypicality of others' profiles. We found that people are more ambiguity averse about men's performance in a task that they are expected to perform well when they have a counter-stereotypical background. Also, people hold more pessimistic beliefs about them, and the effect of these pessimistic beliefs are comparatively enlarged by judges being less a-insensitive towards them. In this sense, counter-stereotypical men were punished both in terms of ambiguity attitudes and beliefs about their competence. Learning of new information diminished the penalty for men in terms of ambiguity attitudes, but more pessimistic beliefs about them persisted.