Publications:
Making and Breaking Promises: On the Voluntary Public Goods Provision under Cost Uncertainty (with Andreas Lange)
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO) 245, 2026: 107471; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2026.107471
The private solution trap in collective action problems across 34 nations (with Eugene Malthouse and CDMCL co-authors)
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) ; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2504632123
The benefits of digital travel information for informal transport: Insights from app users in Cochabamba, Bolivia (with Aljoscha Minnich and Marc Hasselwander)
Journal of Transport Geography ; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2026.104574
Working Papers:
People are often motivated to act in a way that sends a favourable signal about their character. This paper proposes a separation of signalling into its direct and indirect components: an observed behaviour can influence a person’s image directly when the behaviour itself is image-relevant, and it can influence a person’s image indirectly by changing people’s beliefs about an unobserved, image-relevant behaviour. In an experiment on charitable giving, we show that individuals engage in indirect signalling to make an “altruistic bluff”: donors engage in an image-irrelevant behaviour (donating to many charities) to change observers’ beliefs about an unobserved, image-relevant behaviour (donating large amounts). Importantly, this bluff works, as it leads observers to form beliefs that are positively biased. Our experiment also shows that one can mitigate such bluffing either by removing the observed signal or by making the important behaviour observable.
Status: Revise & Resubmit at Experimental Economics
A good neighbor - a found treasure: On the voluntary public good provision in overlapping neighborhoods (Draft available upon request) (with Andreas Lange and Lorenzo Romero)
This paper investigates cooperation in a spatial public goods game with overlapping neighborhoods. Inspired by the public discourse on mixed vs. segregated neighborhoods, we investigate the role of varying spatial allocations of rich and poor for the voluntary provision of public goods. The spatial network structure of public goods investments allows for more nuanced investigations of behavioral motives. We find that participants mainly invest in their own neighborhood, yet that investment patterns respond to concerns of inequality and reciprocity. The spatial clustering of endowments is found to affect inequality. In networks where rich and poor are clustered, we observe that it is the rich located at the border who trigger the redistribution to the poor cluster, thereby reducing inequality between, but also generating inequality within the cluster.
Status: Reject & Resubmit at Experimental Economics
Protecting shared natural resources often requires cooperation across communities. Yet, when formal enforcement is weak, such cooperation is hard to achieve. In a framed field experiment with coastal villages in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, we test whether being observed by one's own community leader improves cooperation between communities. We find that in private, participants cooperate far less with members of other villages than with members of their own, consistent with a strong in-group bias. Observation by an in-group leader, however, raises cooperation with other villages from 17 to 70 percent, closing this gap. Our findings suggest that leader observation might offer a low-cost way to scale community-led conservation beyond the local level.
Status: submitted