Papers
The Inelastic Demand for Affirmative Action (with Demid Getik and Margaret Samahita)
European Economic Review
Abstract: We study the role of financial incentives in driving support for affirmative action (AA) in a series of online experiments. Participants act as employers deciding whether to use AA in hiring. We implement three treatments to disentangle AA preferences stemming from perceived gender differences in productivity, perceived effects of AA on productivity, or other costs of AA for employers. Around 1/3 of employers consistently implement AA, and we do not find any significant difference across treatments, despite successfully altering beliefs about productivity differences. Our results suggest that AA choice reflects a more intrinsic and inelastic preference for advancing female candidates.
Motivated Risk Assessments (with Christoph Drobner)
Conditional accept: Economic Journal
Abstract: Do people form risk assessments to justify their actions? We investigate this question in a field experiment studying the dynamics of risk assessments for visiting a café during the Covid-19 pandemic. By randomly varying the incentive for a visit, we find that participants with a high incentive visit caés more often and downplay the risk compared to those participants with a low incentive. Importantly, the downplaying happens in anticipation of the visit and without new information, suggesting that the assessment update justifies engagement in risky behavior. This finding is inconsistent with Bayesian updating but consistent with the notion of motivated reasoning.
Media: Altinget, Life Science Sweden, forskning.se
Why Do People Discount? The Role of Impatience and Future Uncertainty (with Enrico Diecidue and Hjördis Hardardottir)
Reject & Resubmit: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics
Abstract: Despite the intuition that risk preferences affect intertemporal choice because the future is inherently uncertain, time discounting is commonly regarded as a reflection of impatience. This paper documents evidence that contradicts this standard interpretation. Conducting an intertemporal choice experiment, we provide the first empirical estimate of individual future uncertainty and show that, on average, about 71% of the observed time discounting can be explained by an aversion against future uncertainty rather than impatience. We find that future uncertainty, although small, receives disproportional weight as implied by the notion of nonlinear probability weighting. This result changes our understanding of time discounting: It implies that many people do not demand a compensation for their waiting time but a compensation for the uncertainty of the future.
Intertemporal Pro-Social Choice: The Inconsistency Puzzle
Submitted
Abstract: How does delay in the realization of a prosocial decision affect prosocial choice? This paper first provides a meta-analysis that collects existing evidence on the temporal consistency of prosocial behavior. I show that the evidence on the delay effect on prosocial choice is contradicting but appears reconcilable by a moderating factor: repeated interaction. Motivated by this finding, I conduct an intertemporal donation experiment to closely investigate this moderation effect. I design an experiment that mimics a telephone fundraiser and vary both the timing of the donation (immediate vs. delayed) and the frequency of interaction (one-shot vs. repeated interaction). The results reveal that both under repeated and one-time interaction delayed donations increase relative to immediate donations but the increase is not statistically significant. This evidence suggests that repeated interaction (via telephone) does not provide the conditions for delay to increase prosocial behavior.
Work in Progress
Delaying Good or Delaying Harm? Self-Serving Discount Rates on Impure Altruism (with Arno Apffelstaedt)
Status: Data collection completed. Draft coming soon.
Idea: We study how people time-discount harm and benefits inflicted on others’ future utility and whether the discounting is influenced by different altruistic motives.
Motivated Reasoning and Affirmative Action (with Alain Cohn, Collin Raymond & Yesim Orhun)
Status: Data collection in progress.
Idea: We study how motivated reasoning can reinforce the effect of affirmative actions at workplace and reduce discrimination through lasting changes in beliefs about minorities.