The behavioral economics of bullying at work

While objective numbers are difficult to obtain and vary across studies, surveys suggest that in Western societies between 10% (Europe) and 17% (United States) of employees have been subject to workplace bullying. Being bullied can have very high personal costs for the victim, such as decreasing mental health, lower performance levels and job satisfaction, loss of creative potential, absenteeism, or even resignation. There may also be substantial emotional and physical tolls on witnesses and bystanders. This makes workplace bullying an increasingly important societal problem, that needs to be understood and tackled by state-of-the-art social science research. In this project, I utilize innovative tools of survey research to uncover unbiased field evidence and run well-designed laboratory and field experiments to establish causal relationships. This way, I will exploit the advantages of different empirical strategies while at the same time hedging their caveats.