Similarity and Consistency in Algorithm-Guided Exploration (With Fabian Dvorak, Ludwig Danwitz, Sebastian Fehrler, Lars Hornuf, Hsuan Yu Lin and Bettina von Helversen). (2025). Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
Integrating Semantic Communication and Human Decision-Making into an End-to-End Sensing-Decision Framework (with Edgar Beck, Hsuan-Yu Lin, Patrick Rückert, Bettina von Helversen-Helversheim, Sebastian Fehrler, Kirsten Tracht, Armin Dekorsy). (2026). IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society.
In many repeated economic interactions, players cannot perfectly observe others' past actions but instead receive noisy feedback. Communication has been identified as a key factor in sustaining cooperation under such conditions. However, it remains unclear how its effectiveness depends on the level of noise in monitoring. This study presents a laboratory experiment using an indefinitely repeated Prisoners' Dilemma. Treatments vary along two dimensions: the possibility of communication and the level of monitoring noise. I elicit participants' subjective beliefs about their partner's cooperation as a measure of perceived strategic uncertainty. The results show that communication is more effective under low noise, as participants form higher and more stable beliefs. Further analysis finds differences in communication content across noise levels, which may shape the variation in beliefs.
Sustaining Cooperation With Correlated Information (with Fabian Dvorak and Sebastian Fehrler), R&R at Experimental Economics
In infinitely or indefinitely repeated games with noisy signals about others' actions, sustaining cooperation is difficult. Theoretical work shows that cooperation can be maintained if the signals are correlated and the degree of correlation depends on the actions. In this study, we implement such an information structure in a laboratory experiment and investigate whether subjects are able to sustain cooperation by conditioning their behavior on it. A substantial number of subjects adopt strategies accounting for the correlation, but this does not increase cooperation compared to a control treatment without correlation, as behavior with independent signals is more lenient.
Public Trust in Organizations (with Sebastian Fehrler and Volker Hahn)
Public trust is critical to the functioning of many organizations. Therefore, it is important to understand the institutional characteristics that influence it. Specifically, we ask whether an individualistic or a collectivistic structure makes an organization more trustworthy and whether communication increases public trust. To address these questions, we study repeated versions of a basic trust game in which the trustee is an organization where decisions are made either by an individual or a collective. A game-theoretic analysis implies that public trust may or may not emerge for a collectivist structure with overlapping terms, but that public trust is impossible to achieve for an organization dominated by an individual. Empirically, we find that an individualistic organization can achieve similar levels of cooperation as a long-lived collectivistic organization. This may indicate that cooperation is driven primarily by intrinsic behavioral motivation rather than a desire to influence the future decisions of others.
The causal effect of generative AI on performance and over-reliance in administrative text production. Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment with German senior and future civil servants (with Mareike Sirman-Winkler and Markus Tepe)