1. Effect of Feedback on Beliefs About Self-Ability (JMP)
I study the effect of different feedback structures on belief updating in an ego-relevant task using a controlled experiment. Across treatments, subjects receive feedback through a signal with either a noise component, comparison component, or both. The first two signals are commonly used in the literature, while I develop the latter to systematically analyze the effect of noise and comparison components on belief updating. I find that the signal structure is an important determinant of how subjects update their beliefs. This is driven by men and women exhibiting different biases depending on whether the signal is noisy or comparative. Men underweight bad news when the signal has a noise component and women underweight good news when the signal has a comparison component. These findings have implications for policies aiming to reduce the well-established gender gap in self-confidence through feedback provision.
1. Gender Differences in Advice Giving (Experimental Economics, 2024)
I experimentally investigate whether there is a gender difference in advice giving in a gender-neutral task with varying difficulty in which the incentives of the advisor and the decision maker are perfectly aligned. I find that women are more reluctant to give advice compared to men for difficult questions. The gender difference in advice giving cannot be explained by gender differences in performance. Self-confidence explains some of the gender gap, but not all. The gender gap disappears if advice becomes enforceable. I show that gender differences in propensity to take responsibility and rejection aversion can both potentially explain these findings.
2. Evidence Games: Lying Aversion and Commitment (with Erkut Y. Ozbay, accepted at Games and Economic Behavior)
The voluntary disclosure literature suggests that commitment has no value in evidence games, in which the informed sender chooses which pieces of evidence to disclose to the uninformed receiver who determines the sender's payoff. This is because there is a theoretical equivalence of the optimal mechanism and the game equilibrium outcomes. In this paper, we experimentally investigate whether the optimal mechanism and the game equilibrium outcomes coincide in a simple evidence game. Contrary to the theoretical prediction, our results indicate that outcomes diverge and that commitment has value. We also theoretically show that our experimental results are explained by accounting for lying-averse agents.
3. Behavioral Changes of MTurkers During the COVID-19 Pandemic (with Billur Aksoy, Ian Chadd, Erkut Y. Ozbay, submitted)
We study the economic behaviors and demographics of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and compare them to a pre-pandemic MTurker sample, a student sample, and a representative sample of the United States. We find that MTurkers during the pandemic behave differently than previous MTurkers in many contexts, even after accounting for changes in demographic composition. These MTurkers behave more similarly to a pre-pandemic representative sample than to a student sample. Additionally, we revisit gender differences in preferences and document fewer and smaller differences in many contexts. These results help contextualize online research conducted during the pandemic.