Research

Job Market Paper

 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

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.

Work in Progress


We study whether individuals engage in third-party punishment because they want to enforce social norms. We run an experiment and explicitly measure subjects' beliefs about social norms -- social norm perceptions -- and associated third-party punishment decisions. Specifically, we focus on personal norms of appropriateness, normative expectations, and empirical expectations for a modified dictator game. We further implement four treatments to exogenously shift norm perceptions and thus identify their causal impact. We find that each of the three norm perceptions has a causal  positive impact on punishment on its own. Furthermore, for their joint correlations with punishment, we identify that higher personal norms and empirical expectations are associated with higher punishment decisions, whereas normative expectations are negatively correlated. We observe individual heterogeneity in social norm perceptions and show that their relative importance depends, for instance, on gender or on the role that individuals are assigned to. We conclude that third-party punishment is used for the enforcement of social norms, i.e., beliefs of common behavior, and for the potential creation of new social norms through enforcing the own personal view of appropriateness.



I study gender differences in competitive situations with observational data from German Amateur Football. I have a unique data set on the card-giving behavior of amateur referees, and whether the referees were observed by an evaluator or not. Specifically, I focus on how the card-giving behavior of male and female referees differs, when being in a situation where they get evaluated compared to a situation where they do not get evaluated.