Working Papers

"Contests for Perception" 

Abstract: We observe competitive behavior in different domains of society, even without explicit monetary prizes. In this paper, I model a mechanism that may drive such behavior: I study a contest model where prizes are given by an inactive observer’s posterior belief about a player’s ability. In other words, prizes are determined endogenously in the model. I define the equilibrium in this game and show how expected effort changes with two exogenous parameters: the probability of an agent being high ability and the difference in productive ability between types. I show that expected effort is maximized when uncertainty about players’ abilities is the highest. I identify a novel encouragement effect of ability asymmetry. Total expected effort can increase in ability asymmetry: when the prizes are determined in equilibrium, the discouragement effect from ability heterogeneity can be reversed when heterogeneity is sufficiently low. I also analyze win probabilities when allowing for the observer’s prior to depend on players’ identities: I identify the “underdog effect” where initially decreasing the prior belief about the ability of the player with lower expected ability can nonetheless increase her win probability.

"The Merits of Meritless Promotions" (formerly: "Meritocracy in Hierarchical Organizations") with Timm Behler
Abstract: Why do many political organizations rely on seniority-based promotions, even though competition is widely seen as the best way to identify talented leaders? We propose a new rationale rooted in hierarchical party structures, where leaders rise through successive ranks from a large base. Competitive promotions incentivize the middle-tier to block talented subordinates who threaten their advancement. When promotions from the middle to the top tier follow seniority, this conflict is removed and middle-tier talent selection improves. Counterintuitively, in the long run, even though seniority breaks the link between middle-tier members’ talent and their promotion chances, it produces better top leaders by strengthening the talent pipeline.

"Discouraged by Competition?!" with Timm Behler and Jens Ewald

Abstract: We run a large online experiment where workers compete for monetary prizes based on their performance rank in a real-effort task. We test whether increasing competition through (1) greater prize inequality or (2) larger contest scale affects effort provision. Contrary to the theoretical predictions in Fang, Noe, and Strack (2020), we find that increased competition does not discourage effort. Concentrating the fixed monetary sum into fewer, higher-value prizes both boosts effort provision by over 27% and leads to more dispersed behavior among participants. Increasing contest scale by combining several smaller competitions into a larger one also appears to raise effort provision, although the differences are not statistically significant at conventional levels. We account for our findings with a novel theoretical model that incorporates stimulus-based attention into all-pay contests.

Work in Progress

"Fragile Men" with Timm Behler - fully funded 🎉, in the lab soon 

A (mostly) experimental project on social image-driven opponent selection in competitions. 

"Energy Prices and Environmental Politics" with Jens Ewald
An empirical project where we study how experiencing high energy prices affect voting behavior.

"Personal Agency and Preferences for Redistribution"
I am thinking about how procedural fairness and outcome fairness interact with each other.

Pre-PhD Publications

"A variational-autoencoder approach to solve the hidden profile task in hybrid human-machine teams." with Niccoló Pescetelli and Alex Rutherford. 2022. PloS one, 17(8), e0272168.