Hedda Nielsen

Work in Progress

Fairness in a Society of Unequal Opportunity, with Alexander W. Cappelen, Yiming Liu and Bertil Tungodden.

Abstract: Modern societies are characterized by widespread disparities in opportunities, which play a crucial role in creating income inequalities. This paper investigates how individuals address income inequalities that arise from these unequal opportunities. We report from a large-scale experimental study involving general populations in the United States and Scandinavia, where participants make consequential redistributive decisions as third-party `spectators' for workers facing unequal opportunities. Our findings provide strong evidence that a significant majority of people are willing to accept inequalities originating from unequal opportunities, a stance that contrasts sharply with their reactions to inequality resulting from luck. Two distinct forces drive greater acceptance of inequality under unequal opportunities: the tendency to mistakenly attribute the impact of unequal opportunities to inherent capacity, and the moral relevance attributed to performance differences driven by unequal opportunities. We further demonstrate a clear regional and political divide in responses to unequal opportunities, with Americans and right-wing voters exhibiting a greater acceptance of resulting inequalities, reflecting both divergent fairness views and attribution biases in these populations.

Attempting to Detect a Lie: Do We Think it Through?, with Iuliia Grabova and Georg Weizsäcker. (WP). Submitted

Abstract: Game-theoretic analyses of communication rely heavily on beliefs – especially, the receiver’s belief about the truth status of an utterance and the sender’s belief about the reaction to the utterance. Research that provides measurements of such beliefs is still in its infancy. Our experiment examines the use of second-order beliefs, measuring belief hierarchies regarding a message that may be a lie. In a two-player communication game between a sender and a receiver, the sender knows the state of the world and has a transparent incentive to deceive the receiver. The receiver chooses a binary reaction. For a wide set of non-equilibrium beliefs, the reaction and the receiver’s second-order belief should dissonate: she should follow the sender’s statement if and only if she believes that the sender believes that she does not follow the statement. The opposite is true empirically, constituting a new pattern of inconsistency between actions and beliefs.

Biased Belief Updating and Memory: The Role of Confidence, with Julia Baumann and Ju Yeong Hong.

Abstract:  We investigate the role of over- and underconfidence in belief updating and recall of feedback, using an online experiment. While previous research finds mixed results for how positive and negative feedback impacts belief updating and recall, the overall focus has been on how (asymmetric) belief updating affects individuals’ confidence. Instead, we ask how exogenously inducing high or low confidence impacts feedback processing. In immediate belief updating, we find that underconfidence leads to less reaction to positive feedback compared to overconfidence. We do not find a treatment difference in the response to negative feedback. Further, there are no significant differences in feedback recall with respect to either under-/overconfidence or positive/negative feedback.

Publications

In Swedish

Topp fem-publiceringar av Sverigebaserade forskare 1989-2019, with Magnus Henrekson, Ekonomisk Debatt (48:3), 2020.