Measuring “Group Cohesion” to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production (OA)
Review of Economics and Statistics 2025, 107 (2), 539–554 (with Simon Gächter, and Chris Starmer)
We introduce group cohesion to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the “oneness scale” from psychology. A series of experiments, including a preregistered replication, reveals strong, positive associations between group cohesion and performance assessed in weak-link coordination games, with high-cohesion groups being likely to achieve superior equilibria. In exploratory analysis, we identify beliefs rather than social preferences as the primary mechanism through which factors proxied by group cohesion influence group performance. Our evidence provides proof of concept for group cohesion as a useful tool for economic research and practice.
Scientific Reports 2024, 14(1), 8901 (with Malte Baader, Chris Starmer and Simon Gächter)
The study of relationship closeness has a long history in psychology and is currently expanding across the social sciences, including economics. Estimating relationship closeness requires appropriate tools. Here, we introduce and test a tool for estimating relationship closeness: 'IOS11'. The IOS11 scale has an 11-point response scale, is a refinement of the widely used Inclusion-of-Other-in-the-Self scale. Our tool has three key features. First, the IOS11 scale is easy to understand and administer. Second, we provide a portable, interactive interface for the IOS11 scale, which can be used in lab and online studies. Third, and crucially, based on within-participant correlations of 751 individuals, we demonstrate strong validity of the IOS11 scale in terms of representing features of relationships captured by a range of more complex survey instruments. Based on these correlations we find that the IOS11 scale outperforms the IOS scale and performs as well as the related Oneness scale.
Social closeness can help, harm and be irrelevant in solving pure coordination problems (OA)
Economics Letters 2022, 216, 110552 (with Simon Gächter, Chris Starmer, Christian Thöni and Till O. Weber)
Experimental research has shown that ordinary people often perform remarkably well in solving coordination games that involve no conflicts of interest. While most experiments in the past studied such coordination games among socially distant anonymous players, here we study behaviour in a set of two player coordination games and compare the outcomes depending on whether the players are socially close or socially distant. We find that social closeness influences prospects for coordination, but whether it helps, harms, or has no impact on coordination probabilities, depends on the structure of the game.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Plurality of Social Norms and Saving Behavior in Kenya (OA)
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 2021, 192, 73-91 (with Hanna Fromell, Daniele Nosenzo and Trudy Owens).
In a within subjects design we evaluate distributional preferences and reasoning ability to explain choices in the Traveler's Dilemma. We recruit subjects from economics and non-economics majors to have a high variance of preferences and abilities. We find that economists follow the efficiency criterion while non-economists follow maximin. Economists also show a better reasoning ability. We, therefore, confirm the self-selection hypothesis of choosing a major. An equilibrium of an incomplete information version of the Traveler's Dilemma explains the behavior we observe. Subjects with low reasoning ability make choices away from equilibrium. Thus, (non)cooperative behavior might be misinterpreted if subjects’ reasoning ability is not taken into account.
When is Evidence Actionable? Assessing Whether a Program is Ready to Scale
In The Scale-up Effect in Early Childhood and Public Policy: Why Interventions Lose Impact at Scale and What We Can Do About It. 2021. Eds. J.A. List, D. Suskind and L.H. Supplee. Routledge (with John P.A. Ioannidis and Zacharias Maniadis)
Abstract
The Differential Impact of Friendship on Cooperative and Competitive Coordination (OA)
Theory and Decision 2020, 89(4), 423-452 (with Gabriele Chierchia and Giorgio Coricelli)
Friendship is commonly assumed to reduce strategic uncertainty and enhance tacit coordination. However, this assumption has never been tested across two opposite poles of coordination involving either strategic complementarity or substitutability. We had participants interact with friends or strangers in two classic coordination games: the stag-hunt game, which exhibits strategic complementarity and may foster “cooperation”, and the entry game, which exhibits strategic substitutability and may foster “competition”. Both games capture a frequent trade-off between a potentially high paying but uncertain option and a low paying but safe alternative. We find that, relative to strangers, friends are more likely to choose options involving uncertainty in stag-hunt games, but the opposite is true in entry games. Furthermore, in stag-hunt games, friends “tremble” less between options, coordinate better and earn more, but these advantages are largely decreased or lost in entry games. We further investigate how these effects are modulated by risk attitudes, friendship qualities, and interpersonal similarities.
On the Priming of Risk Preferences: The Role of Fear and General Affect (OA)
Journal of Economic Psychology 2019, 75(Part A), 102137 (with Despoina Alempaki and Chris Starmer)
Priming is an established tool in psychology for investigating aspects of cognitive processes underlying decision making and is increasingly applied in economics. We report a systematic attempt to test the reproducibility and generalisability of priming effects on risk attitudes in a more diverse population than professionals and students, when priming using either a positive or a negative experience. We further test fear as the causal mechanism underlying countercyclical risk aversion. Across a series of experiments with a total sample of over 1900 participants, we are unable to find any systematic effect of priming on risk preferences. Moreover, our results challenge the role of fear as the mechanism underlying countercyclical risk aversion; we find evidence of an impact of general affect such that the better our participants feel, the more risk they take.
Are Victims Truly Worse Off in the Presence of Bystanders? Revisiting the Bystander Effect
Revue Économique 2019, 70(6), 927-943 (with Hanna Fromell, Daniele Nosenzo and Trudy Owens)
Previous studies have shown that individuals are less likely to help a person in need when there are “bystanders” present who can also offer help. We designed an experiment to re-examine this “bystander effect” using modified dictator games. We find lower giving rates in the presence of bystanders, confirming the existence of a bystander effect. However, we also show that the recipient’s welfare is greater when bystanders are present, challenging the usual interpretation that the bystander effect is due to an erosion of prosocial values and social norms.
Management Science 2019, 65(10), 4841-4862 (with Despoina Alempaki, Emina Canic, Timothy Mullett, William Skylark, ChrisStarmer and Neil Stewart)
In a paper published in Management Science in 2015, Stewart, Reimers, and Harris (SRH) demonstrated that shapes of utility and probability weighting functions could be manipulated by adjusting the distributions of outcomes and probabilities on offer as predicted by the theory of decision by sampling. So marked were these effects that, at face value, they profoundly challenge standard interpretations of preference theoretic models in which such functions are supposed to reflect stable properties of individual risk preferences. Motivated by this challenge, we report an extensive replication exercise based on a series of experiments conducted as a quasi-adversarial collaboration across different labs and involving researchers from both economics and psychology. We replicate the SRH effect across multiple experiments involving changes in many design features; importantly, however, we find that the effect is also present in designs modified so that decision by sampling predicts no effect. Although those results depend on model-based inferences, an alternative analysis using a model-free comparison approach finds no evidence of patterns akin to the SRH effect. On the basis of simulation exercises, we demonstrate that the SRH effect may be a consequence of misspecification biases arising in parameter recovery exercises that fit imperfectly specified choice models to experimental data. Overall, our analysis casts the SRH effect in an entirely new light.
Economic Journal 2017, 127(605), F209-F235 (with Zacharias Maniadis and John A. List)
The sciences are in an era of an alleged ‘credibility crisis’. In this study, we discuss the reproducibility of empirical results, focusing on economics research. By combining theory and empirical evidence, we discuss the import of replication studies and whether they improve our confidence in novel findings. The theory sheds light on the importance of replications, even when replications are subject to bias. We then present a pilot meta‐study of replication in experimental economics, a subfield serving as a positive benchmark for investigating the credibility of economics. Our meta‐study highlights certain difficulties when applying meta‐research to systematise the economics literature.
The Research Reproducibility Crisis and Economics of Science
Economic Journal 2017, 127(605), F200-F208 (with Zacharias Maniadis)
To address the increasing concern about research reproducibility, cross‐fertilisation across economics and other disciplines is likely to have far‐reaching benefits. Our brief summary focuses on two areas in which a mutual investment in investigating possible cross‐disciplinary synergies could benefit the scientific endeavour as a whole. First, the discipline of economic design has much to contribute to the discussion of possible reforms in science. Second, the empirical methodology of meta‐research can inform practices to assess the validity of the economics literature.
The Effect of Voluntary Participation on Cooperation
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 2017, 142, 307-319 (with Daniele Nosenzo)
We study the effects of voluntary participation on cooperation in collective action problems. Voluntary participation may foster cooperation through a mechanism of assortative selection of interaction partners based on false consensus bias, or through a mechanism whereby the decision to not participate can be used as a threat against free-riders. We examine the effectiveness of these mechanisms in a one-shot public goods experiment. Voluntary participation has a positive effect on provision only through the threat of non-participation. Assortative selection of interaction partners seems to play a minor role in our setting, whereas the threat of non-participation is a powerful force to discipline free-riding.
The Value of Vulnerability: The Transformative Capacity of Risky Trust (OA)
Judgment and Decision Making 2017, 12(4), 408-414 (with Luigino Bruni)
In an experimental gift-exchange game, we explore the transformative capacity of vulnerable trust, which we define as trusting untrustworthy players when their untrustworthiness is common knowledge between co-players. In our experiment, there are two treatments: the “Information” treatment and the “No-Information” treatment in which we respectively disclose or not information about trustees’ trustworthiness. Our laboratory evidence consistently supports the transformative capacity of trustors’ vulnerable trust, which generates higher transfers, more trustworthiness and increased reciprocity by untrustworthy trustees.
Research in Experimental Economics 2015, Volume 18: Replication in Economic Experiments. Eds. Deck, C. Fatas, E., and Rosenblat, T. Emerald Group Publishing (with Zacharias Maniadis and John A. List)
Efforts in the spirit of this special issue aim at improving the reproducibility of experimental economics, in response to the recent discussions regarding the “research reproducibility crisis.” We put this endeavor in perspective by summarizing the main ways (to our knowledge) that have been proposed – by researchers from several disciplines – to alleviate the problem. We discuss the scope for economic theory to contribute to evaluating the proposals. We argue that a potential key impediment to replication is the expectation of negative reactions by the authors of the individual study, and suggest that incentives for having one’s work replicated should increase.
PLOS ONE 2015, 10, e0129478 (with Simon Gächter and Chris Starmer)
Understanding the nature and influence of social relationships is of increasing interest to behavioral economists, and behavioral scientists more generally. In turn, this creates a need for tractable, and reliable, tools for measuring fundamental aspects of social relationships. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' (IOS) Scale, a handy pictorial tool for measuring the subjectively perceived closeness of a relationship. The tool is highly portable, very easy for subjects to understand and takes less than 1 minute to administer. Across our three online studies with a diverse adult population (n = 772) we show that six different scales designed to measure relationship closeness are all highly significantly positively correlated with the IOS Scale. We then conduct a Principal Component Analysis to construct an Index of Relationship Closeness and find that it correlates very strongly (ρ = 85) with the IOS Scale. We conclude that the IOS Scale is a psychologically meaningful and highly reliable measure of the subjective closeness of relationships.
One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer: Reply to Kataria (OA)
Econ Journal Watch 2014, 11(1), 11–16 (with Zacharias Maniadis and John A. List)
In this paper we reply to Mitesh Kataria’s comment, which criticized the simulations of Maniadis, Tufano, and List (2014, Am. Econ. Rev. 104(1), 277–290). We view these simulations as a means to illustrating the fact that we economists are unaware of the value of key variables that determine the credibility of our own empirical findings. Such variables include priors (i.e., the pre-study probability that a tested phenomenon is true) and the statistical power of the empirical design. Economists should not hesitate to use Bayesian tools and meta-analysis in order to quantify what we know about these variables.
One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer: New Evidence on Anchoring Effects
American Economic Review 2014, 104(1), 277–290 (with Zacharias Maniadis and John A. List)
Some researchers have argued that anchoring in economic valuations casts doubt on the assumption of consistent and stable preferences. We present new evidence that explores the strength of certain anchoring results. We then present a theoretical framework that provides insights into why we should be cautious of initial empirical findings in general. The model importantly highlights that the rate of false positives depends not only on the observed significance level, but also on statistical power, research priors, and the number of scholars exploring the question. Importantly, a few independent replications dramatically increase the chances that the original finding is true.
Experimental Economics 2010, 13(1), 1-13
This paper reports a new and significant experimental demonstration that market participants adjust their bids towards the price observed in previous market periods when—by design—individuals’ values should not be affiliated with the market price. This demonstration implies that market prices may not adjust as standard comparative statics predicts and emphasizes the significance of social aspects even in market contexts. Hence, the present study shows that market behaviour is not anomaly-free. Indeed, market behaviour does not reveal the underlying true preferences but rather context-dependent preferences.
Working Papers (selected)
How Tinted Are Your Glasses? Gender Views, Beliefs and Recommendations in Hiring
SSRN Working Paper 2025 (with Anna Hochleitner, Giovanni Facchini, Valeria Rueda and Markus Eberhardt)
We study the gendered impact of recommendations at different stages of the hiring process. First, using a large sample of reference letters from the academic job market for economists, we document that women receive fewer ‘ability’ letters and more ‘grindstone’ letters. Next, we conduct two experiments — with academic economists and a broader, college-educated population — analyzing both the recommendation and recruitment stages. These experiments confirm that recommendations are gendered and impact recruitment. We also elicit gender views and beliefs about the effectiveness of different letter types, uncovering that these views, along with strategic behavior based on erroneous beliefs, explain referees’ letter choices. Finally, we decompose the gender gaps in recruitment into two components: one capturing differences in how candidates with identical qualities are treated; the other reflecting recruiters’ failure to account for gendered patterns in recommendations. Our findings suggest that this failure to recognize the gendered nature of reference letters perpetuates recruitment disparities and undermines efforts to enhance diversity in hiring.
Measuring Creativity: Associative Thinking in Semantic Networks
CeDEx Discussion Paper 2025-01 (with Malte Baader, Urs Fischbacher and Chris Starmer)
Identifying creative ability and its determinants is crucial in understanding artistic and innovative achievements. Previous work has shown that performance across established creativity tasks does not correlate within participants. A potential reason for this finding is that most creativity tasks lack well-defined performance criteria. In this paper, we develop a novel tool for measuring creative ability and assess its performance through experimental tests. We construct a semantic network serving as the underlying structure of our tool. Based on this network, participants perform two associative thinking tasks, Local Search and Depth Search. We characterise each task by relating it to an established measure of creativity, finding that performance in our proposed tasks is significantly related to their matched creativity task across several dimensions. Our new tool improves on established creativity tasks by utilising a predefined solution space. While capturing key features of established methodologies, it substantially increases on the ease of implementation and interpretation. In addition we also provide causal evidence on the effect of incentives on our tool.