Publications:

• Verrina, E. Upset but (almost) correct: A conceptual replication of di Tella, Perez-Truglia, Babino and Sigman (2015) Journal of the Economic Science Association (2023)
  This paper provides a close conceptual replication of the study by Di Tella et al. (Am Econ Rev 105: 3416–42, 2015) on self-serving beliefs. The design differs in some aspects from the original study, but maintains its fundamental structure and uses a larger sample size. The main findings of the original study are not replicated. If anything, beliefs seem to be biased in the opposite direction. These results are discussed jointly with two other replication efforts by Ging-Jehli et al. (Games Econ Behav 122–341, 2020) and Ahumada et al. (2022). The main conclusion is that self-serving beliefs about others in strategic settings seem to be quite sensitive and hard to capture.

• Hillenbrand, A., & Verrina, E. The asymmetric effect of narratives on prosocial behavior Games and Economic Behavior  (2022)
  We study how positive narratives (stories in favor of a prosocial action) and negative narratives (stories in favor of a selfish action) influence prosocial behavior in a series of lab and online experiments with more than 1500 subjects. We find that, both positive and negative narratives are effective at changing how actions are perceived. However, while positive narratives increase prosocial behavior, negative narratives do not move aggregate behavior and — if anything — lead to slightly more prosocial behavior. Our results indicate that this may be due to the fact that when following a negative narrative an individual is viewed as influenceable — something that appears to be undesirable. Taken together, our study suggests that positive and negative narratives are not just the flip sides of the same coin.

• Mittone, L., Ploner, M. and Verrina, E. When the state does not play dice: aggressive audit strategies foster tax compliance Social Choice and Welfare (2021)
  We experimentally test the effect of aggressive audit strategies on tax compliance. Taxpayers first go through a phase of audits managed by a human tax agent who is requested to follow a rule imposed by a fair random device. However, the tax agent can freely decide to break the rule and over-inspect. Afterward, taxpayers are exposed to a genuinely random audit process governed by an algorithm, which makes compliance a strategically dominated option. We find that taxpayers are generally over-inspected by the human tax agents and react to this with nearly full compliance. Our main result is that these high levels of compliance also persist when controls are implemented by the algorithm. This suggests that tax authorities can use aggressive audit strategies to raise and sustain tax compliance.

  • The importance of being earnest: A behavioral economics study on compliant taxpayers, controls and benefits (UNITRENTOMAG)

Working papers:

• Personal norms - and not only social norms - shape economic behavior (with Zvonimir Bašić) conditionally accepted at the Journal of Public Economics
  We propose a simple utility framework and design a novel two-part experiment to study the relevance of personal norms across various economic games and settings. We show that personal norms — together with social norms and monetary payoff — are highly predictive of individuals’ behavior. Moreover, they are: i) distinct from social norms across a series of economic contexts, ii) robust to an exogenous increase in the salience of social norms, and iii) complementary to social norms in predicting behavior. Our findings support personal norms as a key driver of economic behavior.

  • Video presentation - NoBec ECR Talks

Selected work in progress:

• Group dishonesty: beliefs, incentives, and complicity (with Fabio Galeotti and Rainer Michael Rilke)  under review
  Dishonest behavior often takes place in groups. We investigate two key aspects that define the interconnection within a group - the material connection (incentives) and the psychological connection (complicity) - and study how they influence the relationship between beliefs and dishonesty. Our first main result shows that dishonesty increases (decreases) in the belief that the counterpart is dishonest when incentives are complements (substitutes). Our second main result reveals that complicity does not greatly influence the relationship between beliefs and behavior. We only find a level effect of complicity under substitute incentives for subject with high lying costs. We conclude that beliefs and incentives strongly shape group dishonesty, while the psychological connection due to complicity plays a minor role.

• Updating biases and group identity (with Zvonimir Bašić and Stefan Schmidt) draft in preparation
  We study the interaction between motivated reasoning and cognitive biases. We look at how people update their beliefs in an environment where they can fall prey of selection bias and signals come from members of one’s ingroup or outgroup.

• Social dilemmas and elections: No premium for democratic representation (with Pascal Langenbach) draft in preparation
  We study how the process that leads to the adoption of a norm shapes behavior. We look at whether a non-deterrent punishment rule increases contributions in a public good game, when the rule is chosen by a democratically elected representative who has private information about the effects of such rule in previous experiments. While previous research found a positive premium of direct democratic processes on cooperation, we find no such premium for representative democracy. These findings suggest that the wide use of representative democratic institutions is not due to its cooperation benefits.

• Shocks to identity-relevant beliefs (with Arno Apffelstaedt) design stage
  We study how people search for information and assess the credibility of information sources after a shock to their belief system. We shock people’s belief systems by debunking an identity relevant belief. The underlying idea is that people will try to defend other beliefs that are part of the system to hold on to their identity and may thus become more conservative in their search and more skeptical in their assessment of a source’s credibility.

• Narrtives as excuses (with Marie-Claire Villeval) design stage
  We study how narratives that offer an interpretation of causality affect moral decisions. We look at how causality is assessed when individuals are confronted or not with a moral decision. We, then, investigate how other people’s narratives influence an individual’s own narrative and behavior, and examine the effect of an audience observing one’s narrative and behavior.

• The Dark Side of Experts: Ethical Decision-making under Asymmetric Information in Teams (single-author) draft available upon request
  I investigate the effects of asymmetric information on unethical choices taken by teams. Two team members with perfectly aligned incentives can choose between a profitable option, with potential negative externalities, and a less profitable option, which has no negative externality. One team member has better information about the presence of the externality, i.e., she is the "expert". I find that experts do not behave more unethically when the decision is delegated to them and also do not initiate more unethical behavior. However, they do not intervene to avoid unethical outcomes, thereby ignoring their private information. This hints at an omission-commission asymmetry in the behavior of experts. Overall, this leads to high negative externalities despite the presence of experts.