Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers’ beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

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 pre-registered replication, reveals strong...

This paper examines leadership in relation to supplying a global public good. Both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement encourage the developed countries to take a lead in reducing emissions. Does a country benefit from taking a lead? When does leadership improve global welfare? The answer...

Leaders often have to weigh ethical against monetary consequences. Such situations may evoke psychological costs from being dishonest and dismissing higher monetary benefits for others. In a within-subjects experiment, we analyze such a dilemma. We first measure individual dishonest behavior...

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...

We study the role of face-to-face interaction for gender differences in deceptive behavior and perceived honesty. In the first part, we compare women's to men's deceptive behavior using data from an incentivized income reporting experiment in which lies can be detected in the course of an audit....

By means of a laboratory experiment, we show that, contrary to standard consumer theory, financially equivalent balance sheet profiles may be perceived as non fungible in a controlled frictionless environment with no probabilistic attributes. A large majority of subjects indeed have a bias in...

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty – subjective uncertainty over one’s utility-maximizing action – for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex, they implicitly...

Using an online experiment with two distinct dishonesty games, we analyze how dishonesty in men and women is influenced by either thinking or learning about the dishonesty of others in a related, but different situation. Thinking is induced by eliciting a belief about others’ dishonesty in a...

Women are significantly underrepresented in the technology sector. We design a field experiment to identify statistical discrimination in job applicant assessments and test treatments to help improve hiring of the best applicants. In our experiment, we measure the programming skills of job...