Publications:

• Bašić, Z., & Verrina, E. Personal norms - and not only social norms - shape economic behavior Journal of Public Economics (2024)
  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

• 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:

• Group dishonesty: beliefs, incentives, and complicity (with Fabio Galeotti and Rainer Michael Rilke)  under review
  Dishonest behavior often occurs in groups where actions are interconnected and beliefs about others' behavior may play an important role. We study the relationship between beliefs and dishonesty, focusing on the impact of the nature of the strategic interaction (complements or substitutes) and the reduced feeling of responsibility that arises from acting together with other group members. In settings of strategic complements, we observe that individuals tend to lie more, the more they believe their counterpart to be dishonest. Conversely, in settings of strategic substitutes, individuals tend to lie less as their belief about their counterpart's dishonesty increases. Acting together instead of acting alone-while holding the nature of the strategic interaction and beliefs constant-does not influence the relationship between beliefs and behavior in strategic complements. However, individuals with higher lying costs lie less in strategic substitutes when they are the only active member of the group. Our findings suggest that both beliefs and the type of strategic interaction strongly shape group dishonesty, while responsibility plays a minor role.