Research Interest | Ongoing projects

• Experimental Economics, Behavioral Economics, Game Theory, Law and Economics

• Project "Human-Machine Transactions: Behavioral Micro-foundations and Legal Implications " funded by Czech Science Foundation, PI Sven Hoeppner

Publications

• Čellárová, Katarína, and Rostislav Staněk. "Contest and resource allocation: An experimental analysis of entitlement and self-selection effects." European Journal of Political Economy (2024): 102526. 

• Staněk, Rostislav, Ondřej Krčál, and Katarína Čellárová. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps: Identifying procedural preferences against helping others in the presence of moral hazard." Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 98 (2022): 101851. 

Work in progress

• Social Norms Expectations in Third-Party Punishment (with Jonathan Stäbler)

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. 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 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.

• Strategic vs. in-group motivations of bystanders to intervene (with Ondřej Krčál)

We use a laboratory experiment to study and disentangle the effect of two factors that could potentially increase bystander intervention. In the game of three, one player has the power to change the decision to relocate money from a weaker to a stronger player. We manipulate the probability that this player can become a victim and a composition of triplets and find that both the positive probability of becoming a victim and the same social identity increase intervention. However, the effects of these two manipulations do not add up, therefore, it is possible to treat them as potential substitutional measures.

• How strong are anti-social motives in the money-burning game? (with Ondřej Krčál and Rostislav Staněk)  Forthcoming in Journal of the Economic Science Association (JESA)

The money-burning game is widely used to study antisocial or destructive behavior. We extend the design of the money-burning game to separate the three motives that could lead subjects to burn their partner's money -- the pleasure of harming or beating the other, reciprocity, and inequality aversion. We detect that reciprocity is the dominant reason: Most of our subjects would only burn their partner’s money if they believed that their partner would burn theirs. This finding has important implications for the interpretation of the game.

Teaching experience

• Charles University, Prague - Spring 2024 (Bachelor level)

  • Tutorials in Law and Economics II 

• University of Cagliari

  • Experimental methods in Economics and Business - Spring 2023 (PhD level)

• University of Economics in Bratislava

  • Behavioral Economics - Spring 2023 (Bachelor level)

• Masaryk University, Brno

  • Game theory tutorials - Spring 2021, 2022 (Bachelor level)

  • Tutorials in Intermediate Microeconomics - Fall 2018 - 2022 (Master level)