| 1. |
- Barron, Kai, et al.
(författare)
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Confidence and Career Choices: An Experiment
- 2018
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Confidence is often seen as the key to success. Empirical evidence about whether such beliefs causally map into actions is, however, sparse. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the causal effect of an increase in confidence about one’s own ability on two central choices made by workers in the labor market: choosing between jobs with different incentive schemes, and the subsequent choice of how much effort to exert within the job. Using a hard-easy task manipulation to shift beliefs, we find that beliefs can be shifted, which in turn shifts decisions. In our setting, the beliefs of low ability individuals are more malleable than those of high ability individuals. Therefore, the treatment induces an increase in confidence and detrimental decision making by low ability workers but does not affect the outcomes of high ability workers. Men and women react similarly to the treatment. However, men hold higher baseline beliefs, implying that women make better incentive choice decisions. Policy implications regarding pre-labor market confidence development by means of feedback and grade inflation are discussed.
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| 2. |
- Barron, Kai, et al.
(författare)
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Moral Motive Selection in the Lying-Dictator Game
- 2022
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An extensive literature documents that people are willing to sacrifice personal material gain to adhere to a moral motive. Yet, less is known about what happens when moral motives are in conflict. We hypothesize that individuals engage in what we term “motive selection,” namely adhering to the moral motive that aligns with their self-interest. We test this hypothesis using a laboratory experiment that induces a conflict between two of the most-studied moral motives: fairness and truth-telling. In line with our hypothesis, our results show that individuals prefer to adhere to the moral motive that is more aligned with their self-interest.
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| 3. |
- Barron, Kai, et al.
(författare)
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Time Preferences and Medication Adherence: A Field Experiment with Pregnant Women in South Africa
- 2020
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The effectiveness of health recommendations and treatment plans depends on theextent to which individuals follow them. For the individual, medication adherence in-volves an inter-temporal trade-off between expected future health benefits and immedi-ate effort costs. Therefore examining time preferences may help us to understand whysome people fail to follow health recommendations and treatment plans. In this paper,we use a simple, real-effort task implemented via text message to elicit the time prefer-ences of pregnant women in South Africa. We find evidence that high discounters aresignificantly less likely to report to adhere to the recommendation of taking daily ironsupplements daily during pregnancy. There is some indication that time-inconsistencyalso negatively affects adherence. Together our results suggest that measuring timepreferences could help predict medication adherence and thus be used to improve pre-ventive health care measures.
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| 4. |
- Brütt, Katharina, et al.
(författare)
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Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS. - : National Academy of Sciences. - 1091-6490 .- 0027-8424. ; 120:23
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity-variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity-estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs-indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
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