Research

Job Market Paper

• Disclosure Policy in Contests with Sabotage and Group Size Uncertainty

 In many contests, players are not aware of how many competitors they face. While existing studies examine how disclosing this number affects their productive effort, this paper is the first to consider its impact on destructive behavior. For doing so, I theoretically and experimentally study how revealing the number of contestants affects both effort and sabotage compared to concealing this information. Further, I evaluate the created value by comparing the resulting performances, which are shaped by the combination of the exerted effort and the received sabotage. I show that the overall performance can be higher under concealment, even though the disclosure policy does not affect average effort and sabotage levels. The experimental results largely confirm these theoretical predictions and demonstrate the significance of accounting for the effects of sabotage, as it induces performance differences between the group size disclosure policies. By concealing the number of contestants, a designer can mitigate the welfare-destroying effects of sabotage, without curbing the provision of value-creating effort.

Working Papers

• Spite in Litigation (with Wladislaw Mill)

This paper studies how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by agents motivated by spiteful preferences under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. We conduct an experiment and find that litigation expenditures and settlement requests are higher for more spiteful participants. The relative increase in litigation expenditures due to spite is more pronounced under the American fee-shifting rule. We further find that the expected payoff for more spiteful societies is lower than for less spiteful societies. This effect is particularly pronounced for low-merit cases under the English rule compared to a constant cost under the American rule.

• Social Norm Perceptions in Third-Party Punishment (with Katarína Cellárová)

Costly punishment by unaffected third parties can play an important role in sustaining cooperation and deterring selfish behavior. Such third-party punishment has been taken as evidence in itself that individuals care about the enforcement of social norms. In this paper, we explicitly study whether and which norm-related beliefs motivate third-party punishment. To do so, we run an experiment where we elicit punishment decisions in a modified dictator game and measure three social norm perceptions: personal norms of appropriateness, beliefs about others' appropriateness norms (normative expectations), and beliefs about typical behavior (empirical expectations). We find that higher personal norms of appropriateness and higher empirical expectations lead to an increase in punishment. Normative expectations, on the other hand, are negatively correlated with punishment when controlling for either of the other two norm perceptions. We conclude that the desire to enforce own beliefs of appropriateness or typical behavior motivates punishment decisions rather than perceived societal appropriateness views.