Research Projects
Papers
Motivated Risk Assessments
Revise and Resubmit: Economic Journal
Abstract: Do people form risk assessments to justify their actions? I investigate this question in a field experiment studying the dynamics of risk assessments for visiting a café during the COVID-19 pandemic. Randomly varying the incentive for a visit, I find that subjects with a high incentive visit cafés more often and downplay the risk compared with subjects 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. In additional analyses, I decompose perceived risk into different layers (risk for self and risk imposed on others) and explore which one is downplayed most. I study treatment effect heterogeneity, assess potential mechanisms, and document spillover effects to risk assessment of other activities.
Media: Altinget, Life Science Sweden, forskning.se
The Inelastic Demand for Affirmative Action (with Demid Getik and Margaret Samahita)
Submitted
Abstract: We study the drivers of support for gender-related affirmative action (AA) in two pre-registered online experiments (totaling N=1,700). Participants act as employers who decide whether to use AA in hiring job candidates. We implement three treatments to disentangle the preference for AA stemming from i) perceived gender differences in productivity, ii) beliefs about AA effects on productivity, or iii) other non-material motives. To test i), we provide information to employers that there is no gender gap in productivity. To test ii), we inform the candidates about the hiring rule ex-ante, allowing us to elicit employers' expectation of AA effect on productivity. To test iii), we remove the payment to the employers based on the chosen candidates' productivity, thus making AA cheaper. Around a third of employers choose AA and we do not find any significant difference across treatments, despite successfully altering beliefs about expected productivity differences. Our results suggest that AA choice reflects a more intrinsic and inelastic preference for advancing female candidates.
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.
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.
Paper available on request
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.