Publications in Refereed Journals
(Canadian Journal of Economics/ Revue canadienne d'économique, Forthcoming) [replication package]
This paper studies how litigation and settlement behaviour is affected by agents motivated by spiteful preferences under the American fee-shifting rule compared to the English one. We conduct an experiment and find that litigation expenditures are overall higher under the English rule compared to the American rule—even for low-merit cases—while there is no difference for settlement requests. Spiteful participants exhibit overall higher expenditures and settlement requests, with a more pronounced increase in litigation expenditures under the American fee-shifting rule and a similar increase in settlement requests under both rules. Being spiteful comes at a cost. The expected payoff is lower for more spiteful litigants—especially under the American rule—independent of facing a less or more spiteful opponent. Additionally, being matched with a more spiteful litigant reduces the expected payoff similarly under both rules. We conclude that the English rule can protect spiteful players from themselves but cannot reduce the harm they inflict upon others—at the cost of inducing higher litigation expenditures for less spiteful players compared to the American rule.
(European Economic Review, Volume 179, October 2025, 105120) [pre-print][replication package]
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
Social Norm Perceptions in Third-Party Punishment (with Katarína Cellárová) (R&R/ No commitment at Social Choice and Welfare)
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.
Managing Excess Demand for Primary Care: Evidence from Online Experiments (with Diya Abraham and Ondřej Krčál) (Under Review)
Primary healthcare systems in many developed countries are under strain, partly due to unrestricted patient demand. In response, policymakers have introduced measures to curb unnecessary GP visits, including (i) instituting a small upfront fee for GP visits, (ii) implementing a self-report based triage system, and (iii) providing more information to patients about their condition before they make an appointment with their GP. We evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches using two online experiments with a representative sample of UK adults. The first experiment involves induced monetary incentives in a laboratory-style study while the second is a health-framed vignette study. We find that while all three interventions are effective in the laboratory study, only the intervention that provides patients with more information about their condition reduces low-priority demand in the vignette study. We discuss implications for policy and for the study of health-related decision-making.
Selected Work in Progress
Fraud and Motivated Reasoning in Competition (with Raphael Epperson) Working Paper coming soon
Repeated global public good games with local information (with Diya Abraham, Ondřej Krčál, and David Šlosar) Running Experiments
Meritocracy and Social Cohesion (with Paul Hild and Henrik Orzen) Planning Experiments
Corruption, Competition, and Monitoring (with Thomas de Haan) Planning Experiments
Biased Information Environments and Redistribution (with Gergely Hajdu) Planning Experiments