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 available signals, using an experimental design that varies informativeness and a method that separately measures attitudes and beliefs. When signal-event associations are uncertain and must be inferred from sampling (experience), aversion decreases as signals become more informative, and insensitivity drops sharply under the strongest signal. By contrast, when associations are fully known (description), aversion is essentially unchanged across informativeness levels, while insensitivity shows at most a modest response. This contrast suggests the informativeness effect reflects responses to ambiguity about signal-event associations. Separately measuring attitudes and beliefs proves consequential: the two can move in different directions, and failure to separate them overstates conservatism in updating. For beliefs, subjects in description underweight signal information relative to the Bayesian benchmark, while subjects in experience cannot be distinguished from it under our baseline prior specification, though this finding is sensitive to the assumed prior.
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.