Research
Job Market Paper
Competing Against Stereotypes: Stereotyped Beliefs and Willingness To Compete (with Michael Hilweg-Waldeck) Draft
Career choice, earnings, and other key economic outcomes have been linked to gender differences in willingness to compete. This paper examines how gender stereotypes shape these differences. We conduct a meta-study of prior work and demonstrate that the wide variation in gender competition gaps can be explained by stereotypes: Men enter competitions more in traditionally male-stereotyped domains, whereas in female-stereotyped domains, the gap is smaller or even reversed. Importantly, these differences are not explained by gender gaps in performance. To explore mechanisms, we collect belief data in an elicitation experiment. We find that stereotyped beliefs about gender performance differences explain more than half of the variation in competition gaps in the literature. Next, we experimentally manipulate stereotypes through framing and informational cues about others’ beliefs. Although these interventions significantly shift beliefs, the effects do not translate into changes in competitive behavior. Our findings highlight the importance of stereotypes in shaping gender gaps in competitiveness while suggesting that shifting beliefs alone is unlikely to close these gaps without deeper or longer-term interventions.
Working Paper
Why Don’t Donors Deduct? Social Norms and the Limits of Tax Incentives (with Michael Hilweg-Waldeck) Draft
Many donors leave tax benefits unclaimed even when doing so requires minimal effort and yields meaningful financial rewards. Findings from our representative survey point to confusion about how to deduct donations and to misperceived social norms about the moral appropriateness of doing so as the main drivers of this gap. We study how to tackle these two sources of the deduction gap by providing concise information on how to deduct donations and a one-sentence norm cue in an online experiment (n = 483), a door-to-door field experiment with address-level randomization (n = 6,728), and a radio-based campaign spanning two Austrian federal states. We find that almost all donors deduct when donating through the anonymous online tool. By contrast, during face-to-face fundraising, where social-image concerns are salient, fewer than 1 in 100 donors choose to do so. Across settings, information on how to deduct donations alone leaves deduction behavior unchanged, whereas combining this information with the norm cue increases take-up in the door-to-door setting. Our findings show that financial incentives can falter when clashing with misperceived norms in social settings, unless paired with campaigns that reshape those norms.
Selected Works in Progress
Inequality as a Constraint on (Repugnant) Markets (with Jakob Schmidhäuser) [draft available soon!]
Repugnant markets, such as organ sales, are often restricted even when they could raise efficiency. We study whether income inequality between transacting parties shapes public repugnance toward such exchanges. We implement vignette experiments in US and European samples. Across both samples, inequality between parties is a powerful predictor of repugnance: transactions are viewed as most objectionable when a low-income individual sells to a medium-income individual and least objectionable when both parties are medium-income. Between the two samples, we find clear differences in baseline attitudes. Europeans show stronger repugnance overall: they are more likely to judge kidney sales and surrogate motherhood as unacceptable, while they do not view prostitution as objectionable to the same degree as Americans, consistent with prevailing social norms. These results provide new evidence on how cultural norms and the direction of inequality shape acceptance of contested markets and can inform debates on the design of market regulation.
Non-Standard Choice and Matching (with Gian Caspari, Michael Hilweg-Waldeck, Manshu Khanna, Vincent Meisner) [collecting data]
Choice mistakes arise when individuals’ observed choices deviate from their underlying preferences, often due to cognitive overload or complex menus. This project studies such mistakes in matching markets through a controlled laboratory experiment. Participants face real-effort tasks bundled into menus of varying complexity. These are allocated via different assignment mechanisms, including classic serial dictatorship and a novel sequentialized variant. The design allows us to measure when and why mistakes occur and to evaluate how simplifying choice environments affects efficiency, stability, and incentive properties of market design.
Meritocracy and Social Cohesion (tentative title) (with Henrik Orzen and Jonathan Stäbler) [planning experiment]
Think Before You Act (with Michael Hilweg-Waldeck and Jonathan Stäbler) [collecting data]