Work in progress

Fairness, effort and contribution: Insights into meritocracy in hierarchical settings

Status: writing the draft

Earnings are often assumed to reflect effort, but individual contributions in production are far more complex, particularly in teamwork settings. This paper explores perceptions of fairness and contribution in hierarchical teams, where one individual—the leader—plays a pivotal role in determining output. Leaders often act as multipliers, enhancing the productivity of all team members. Consequently, fairness perceptions may support higher compensation for leaders, recognizing their disproportionate contribution. However, this view may clash with an egalitarian perspective, where equal effort across team members suggests equal rewards. We investigate these tensions using an experimental design in which third-party spectators allocate the output of a team that has completed a joint production task. The production function ensures that the leader’s role is pivotal: without their effort, output is zero, but with their effort, the output is maximized. Teams vary along two dimensions: (1) size, ranging from 2 to 9 members, and (2) how the leader is assigned—either randomly or through a meritocratic process. Spectators allocate rewards under conditions where effort is equal across team members, isolating how perceived contribution shapes their decisions. Results reveal how leadership assignment (random vs. merit) and team size influence perceptions of fairness and contribution, with implications for the allocation of rewards.

Anticipated Discrimination, Gender Stereotypes, and Competitive Choices in Job Applications: A Large-Scale Online Experiment, with M. Hilweg-Waldeck, E. O'Leary & A. Zednik

Status: writing the draft

We study to what extent including evaluator subjectivity in tournament decisions affects the doc- umented gender gap in competition. We conduct a large-scale, pre-registered online experiment (𝑛 = 7310) in which workers choose between a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive pay- ment scheme whose payout depends on being selected by an incentivised human evaluator. By ran- domly varying whether the evaluator can observe the worker’s gender across a male-stereotyped and a non-stereotyped task, we exogenously induce the scope for anticipated discrimination. In the male-stereotyped task, gender revelation breaks the link between women’s objective perfor- mance beliefs and their beliefs about being selected: conditional on the subjective probability of having the best signal, moderately confident women report significantly lower selection expecta- tions when their gender is known. This distortion reduces female entry rates, with the strongest effects among non-risk averse participants: those who made up the majority of the competitor pool when their gender was concealed. The revelation of gender in the male-stereotyped domain particularly effects low-ability women, destabilising the negative association between ability and competition among females. We validate that this effect is driven by the anticipation of gender dis- crimination and not by a preference for opting out of settings in which gender is made salient: in a non-stereotyped task we find no change in beliefs nor in competition behaviour when their gender is revealed to the evaluator. Our findings suggest that the extent to which the gender competition gap distorts female labour supply may be underestimated in the face of the potential for evaluator bias, even before it is enacted.

Parental beliefs, engagement, and time-use investments in pre-schoolers, with Fort M., Bigoni M., Bortolotti S., Iorio D., Monfardini C., Guarini A., Sansavini A., Suttora C.

Status: submitted

Paper: CEPR Discussion Paper [pdf]

This paper presents a novel app-based survey designed to elicit beliefs from parents of preschoolers about the impact of parental time investments on children’s well-being. The survey encompasses a wide range of activities that a child can perform and allows to differentiate the intrinsic value of the activity from the significance of parental engagement. Through exploratory factor analysis, four key factors emerge: beliefs on the role of autonomy, parental engagement, culture and managing conflict. Using two distinct samples from the same population, we show that parental belief indicators exhibit strong internal validity and consistency. Notably, they correlate with engagement and the quality of daily parent-child interactions, as measured by 24-hour parental time diaries. The association of parental beliefs on engagement and parental time investments is large and roughly equivalent to the difference in time investments between parents employed part-time and full-time. A one standard-deviation in the relative importance parents attribute to their presence leads to about 1.5 hours more of engaged time, net of individual time-invariant unobserved factors.

Trust in unequal societies: An experimental study, with E. O'Leary

Status: data collection

This study aims to investigate how the source of inequality affects trust beliefs and how this contrasts to observed behaviour. In an online experiment, we exogneously vary whether a fixed inequality within a society of participants is determined through luck or through a meritocratic process. We form dyads from a society to play a trust game and a dictator game and elicit beliefs about the other’s actions. This allows us to disentangle to what extent inequality, and the source of such, affects trust and other regarding preferences for equal distribution

Norms of redistribution and fairness ideals: An experimental study in Italy

Status: writing the draft

This study explores the persistent North-South divide in Italy through the lens of inequality acceptance and fairness norms. While prior research has focused on prosocial behaviors, this work uniquely examines the perceived fairness ideals and redistribution norms in these regions. The study employs an adapted methodology inspired by Krupka and Weber (2013), alongside the third-party spectator framework of Almås et al. (2020), to investigate whether social norms regarding redistribution differ based on regional identity and the source of inequality (luck or merit). This work contributes to the literature by uncovering cultural variations in fairness perceptions within Italy and providing insights into methodological advancements in eliciting social norms.

Behavioral economics (ECN421) - TA; M.Sc. level, Norwegian School of Economics 

• 2023-2024-2025

Diversity and inclusive work-life in firms and ethics (ETI452) - TA; M.Sc. level, Norwegian School of Economics

• 2025

Conferences and Workshops

• SABE Annual Conference - June 2025, University of Trento

• Workshop on Meritocratic Preferences - June 2025, Stockholm

• Berlin Bergen Behavioral Workshop - March 2023 and April 2025, Bergen and Berlin

Training

• 2nd Summer School in Experimental and Behavioral Economics - July 2025, University of Crete

• Spring School in Behavioral Economics - March 2024, Rady School of Management at UC San Diego

• PhD Course in Survey Methodology - May 2023, University of Copenhagen