Working papers

• Effects of written self-promotions on gender bias and decision quality (with Marina Schröder)[pdf](under review)
  Abstract

  Written self-promotion is crucial in numerous decision-making scenarios, including job applications, securing funds for start-ups, or academic grant proposals. In two experiments, we study the effects of self-promotions written by applicants on decision-makers, focusing on decision quality and gender bias. show that providing such self-promotions slightly improves decision quality. Concerning gender bias, we find that self-promotions do not induce a gender bias that harms women. Moreover, the provision of selfpromotions can even eliminate pre-existing gender bias when no other performance signals are available.
• Piece-rate incentives and idea generation - An experimental analysis (with Katharina Laske and Marina Schröder) Link to the word illustration task (WIT)[pdf]
  Abstract

  Understanding how organizational design affects idea generation is key to fostering innovation. In the context of idea generation, incentives may impact how hard ideators work (effort) and the types of ideas generated. We introduce two versions of a novel experimental task to quantify both of these effects. We show that piece-rate (PR) incentives increase the number of innovative ideas generated. Incentives lead to an increase in effort provision and a shift toward generating ideas that require less time in the realization. If anything, aligning incentives more closely to the desirable outcomes mitigates the effect of PR incentives on idea generation.
• Minority Judges, Major Impact? Conformity-Driven Gender Bias on Judging Panels for Startup Pitch Competitions (with Richard Bläse)[draft available upon request]
  Abstract

  From funding pitches to job interviews, individuals often face panels—not single evaluators—whose decisions determine critical outcomes. Using novel data from Swiss startup pitch competitions, we show that the extent of in-group gender bias varies systematically with the panel’s gender composition. When the entrepreneur’s gender differs from the panel majority, same-gender judges exhibit a conformity-driven negative in-group bias, disadvantaging same-gender entrepreneurs. We establish a link between this bias and the judges’ relative confidence. Overall, our findings suggest that increasing female representation among judging panels—as often suggested—may not advance women’s success if they remain the panel minority.
• Guidance matters: Experimental evidence on effects of advice and feedback on self-evaluation (with Marina Schröder)[draft available upon request]
  Abstract

  We experimentally investigate how guidance shapes workers’ self-evaluation. We observe that guidance from informed mentors increases the informativeness of self-evaluation independent of timing, aligning them more closely to actual performance. When offered prior to any self-assessment (advice) guidance equally increases (decreases) self-evaluation of workers who receive positive (negative) guidance. Guidance has asymmetric effects when provided based on an initial self-assessment (feedback), with stronger responses among of those receiving positive guidance. This particularly amplifying self-evaluation among workers’ classified as ‘high-potentials’, based on their performance. Although we find that initial self-evaluation influences mentors’ guidance, asymmetric effects are primarily driven by workers’ differential responses to guidance, rather than differences in its content. From the worker’s perspective, feedback is the most advantageous format of guidance while both advice and feedback enhance the efficiency of investment allocation by making self-evaluation more informative of actual performance.
• The effect of affirmative action on self-evaluation (with Marina Schröder)[draft available upon request]
  Abstract

  We provide experimental evidence of the effects of inequality and affirmative action (AA) on self-evaluation and selection efficiency in competitive contests. The findings reveal that both inequality and AA significantly affect self-evaluation of those disadvantaged by it, while beneficiaries show no response. We document performance-dependent heterogeneity in responses to both inequality and AA, leading to reduced informativeness of self-evaluation. This tends to affect selection efficiency, increasing selection errors among decision-makers who select contest winners whenever inequality is in place. We observe that AA tends to additionally increase selection errors and that the increase is primarily due to the choice restrictions imposed.

Work in progress

• It’s a match! Team composition and performance in innovation-related tasks (with Joshua Graff-Zivin)[draft in preparation]
  Abstract

  We provide causal evidence of the effect of social connections on team formation preferences and team performance in an innovation-related task. Using a novel experimental design, we induce social connection in a large-scale online study via a short 2 minute video conversation. We can show that workers prefer to form a team with a lower-skilled worker they have communicated with prior to the team task than with higher-skilled workers they have not spoken to. This affects skill composition and social closeness within teams formed based on workers’ preferences. By examining team performance, we show that while social interaction can improve performance, preference-based matching offsets better outcomes. Our findings imply that self-formed teams may be configured sub-optimally as they can be biased by social connections.
• Deliberate? An Experiment on Team Decision Making (with Alex Chan and Melisa Kurtis)[draft in preparation]
  Abstract

  Team decision-making is crucial in economic decisions, such as in corporate boards, research consortia, and hiring committees. We experimentally investigate the effects of diversity in priors and input aggregation mechanism on team performance in an estimation task. Teams in our experiment share the common objective to accurately estimate the ”type” of an imperfectly observed candidate. First, we exogenously vary team member priors and team (prior) diversity. We find that fully diverse teams make more accurate estimations than partially diverse or homogenous teams. Second, we vary the format of decision-making. The findings reveal that performance and benefits of diversity both depend on the team decision-making format. Team deliberation via online chat reduces accuracy. Initial speakers bias the team’s estimation towards their own priors, but first speakers with minority views (of priors) lead to more accurate team estimations.

WIT is an ideation task that comes with an objective performance measure and other great advantages (check out Laske, Römer and Schröder (2024) for details). Want to use WIT? Check out the easy-to-implement version I share on Github.

My personal top three ideas generated in experiments using this task

1. ‘Dragon’

   

2. ‘Drums’

   

3. ‘Parrot’

   

2024

GfeW (Cologne)

2023

COPE (Amsterdam), Maastricht University Center of Neuroeconomics, EEA (Barcelona), Verein für Socialpolitik (Regensburg), RISE Workshop (Munich)

2022

LESSAC Seminar (Dijon), ASFEE (Lyon), Brown Bag Seminar of the Organizational Economics Chair at LMU (Munich), ESA Europe (Bologna), Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (London), 2nd Berlin Workshop on Empirical Public Economics: Gender Economics (Berlin)

2021

ESA Global Online Around-the-Clock Meeting, GfeW (Magdeburg)