Projects

Firms designing incentive programs face important questions about their effectiveness - When do financial rewards work, when does social information work, and does combining them do more than either alone to influence consumer behavior? We address these using a randomized field experiment at a U.S. university recreation center, assigning participants of a group exercise program to one of four conditions - financial incentives (FI), rank information (RI), both (combined), or neither (control). Our results show that neither FI, RI, nor their combination significantly increases workout frequency or variety over the four-week intervention. However, FI and the combined treatment each improve goal completion (i.e., meeting weekly workout targets), relative to control, reflecting a shift in the temporal distribution of effort rather than an increase in total activity. Only the combined treatment shows persistence of effects on goal completion in the two weeks after the incentive period ends. Our mechanism analyses show stronger effects among participants who engage early on with the incentive program and explain the added value of rank information when paired with financial incentives for high-ranking participants and for openers of rank emails. The treatment effects are heterogeneous; the combined treatment works best for participants with salient intrinsic goals such as weight loss, whereas FI alone is effective for those without such goals. Both work better for consumers with past experience in the workout program. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of incentive programs depends on consumer motivation and program engagement with implications for how firms should target and structure wellness offerings.

Gender disparities in tenure and promotion persist across STEM fields, including economics, partly due to statistical discrimination when review committees cannot clearly assess individual contributions to collaborative work. In Study 1, using publication data from 104 RePEc-ranked economics journals (October 2020–March 2021), we find that 74% of female economists (vs. 19% of male) coauthor in male-dominated teams, settings where attribution ambiguity may exacerbate evaluative bias. In Study 2, a randomized survey experiment (N = 233) with female economists shows that exposure to empirical evidence on attribution bias significantly shifts coauthorship preferences toward female-dominated teams, especially among early-career researchers. A follow-up survey (N = 54) indicates that the intervention provided new information, retained for months, that influenced how participants think about coauthorship strategically. These findings suggest that integrating attribution-bias awareness into mentoring and professional development, particularly for early-career scholars, can promote strategic coauthorship choices, enhance individual visibility, and help address the leaky pipeline reinforced by evaluative bias, much like the advice for Ph.D. candidates to produce solo-authored job market papers to signal individual ability.

How audiences evaluate self-promotion, and whether responses vary by gender, remains poorly understood. I examine this using a randomized trial in MBA classrooms, where students viewed a professor’s self-promotion via a slide prior to completing evaluations. On average, self-promotion increased ratings for both male and female faculty. Responses, however, depended systematically on evaluator identity and beliefs - male students rewarded self-promoting male professors and showed no significant penalty toward self-promoting female professors, whereas female students penalized self-promoting male professors but not female professors. Attribution-process analyses show backlash is strongest when male professors are seen as structurally advantaged, succeeding with less effort, or highly competent, and when self-promotion is interpreted as informative rather than boastful. Similar beliefs about female professors elicited only limited penalties. By integrating role-congruity, statistical discrimination, and attribution-process perspectives, the findings show that self-promotion’s effectiveness depends on the interaction between the self-promoter’s identity, the evaluator’s identity, and evaluators’ causal attributions. Organizational practices encouraging self-promotion may thus inadvertently produce unequal rewards and reinforce career inequities.

While it is well established that a prison incarceration often causes a life-long stigma, there is only a limited understanding of how the prison inmates anticipate such mistreatment. In Study 1, we investigate the beliefs of Czech inmates (N=297) about trust and altruism by the general public to them while varying if their prison identity is revealed, using an incentivized lab-in-the-field experiment. We find strong evidence of optimism bias in anticipated altruism. Furthermore, we examine the causal impact of a self-affirmation intervention but find no significant effects on any of the outcomes. In Study 2 (N=489), we conceptually replicate the optimism bias in altruism and identify the likely underlying mechanism to be the perception that the public sympathizes with their experiences of prison hardships and the ambiguity about the crime they committed. The overoptimism dissipates in a more dynamic setting when directly questioned. Our findings underscore the importance of addressing optimism bias in stigma expectations to improve the effectiveness of reintegration programs for inmates.

This study examines gender bias in performance evaluations made by male leaders during an incentivized, team-based simulated task. Using a correspondence-style experimental design with three treatment arms that vary in performance ambiguity and the cost of biased decision-making, I find that under ambiguous conditions (\textit{No Information} treatment), male leaders are 33–40.5% more likely to replace perceived female team members. Increasing performance transparency Information treatment) mitigates statistical discrimination based on group attributes; however, replaced female team members still face 16.8-21% stricter performance thresholds, reinforcing glass ceiling effects. A novel incentive-based intervention (Reward treatment) provides suggestive evidence that increasing the cost of biased decisions can reduce taste-based discrimination. These findings highlight the theoretical interplay between statistical and taste-based bias in organizational performance evaluations and offers an innovative and practical incentive-driven approach to promoting fairness without imposing explicit diversity mandates.

Assessment tests are used extensively to measure student learning. Other than ability and prior preparation, student performance reflects their intrinsic motivation to do well on the test, affecting their effort on the test itself. We experimentally increase the numerosity (magnitude) of maximum points on the test to create an illusion of a more rewarding test and nudge students to exert higher effort on the test. Tested in three different settings, we find insignificant treatment effects in the high-stake test context (Setting 1) and low-stake test context (Setting 2) when an incorrect response does not attract a negative penalty. However, in a high-stake test context, when an incorrect response attracts a penalty (Setting 3), we find the likelihood of getting the question correct increases by 9.5 pp, with stronger effects on male (16 pp) and above-median ability (16 pp) students. We discuss increasing mental effort as the potential mechanism driving the effects.