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briq student fellow portraits: Luca Henkel

The briq scholarship program supports about 25 Ph.D. students at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics. Some of them are directly involved in briq research activities. In a series of short portraits, the briq newsroom introduces our student fellows and what they do. One of them is Luca Henkel, who has been at briq since July 2017.

What is your favorite research area?

I’m generally interested in individual decision-making: how do people make choices under various circumstances and situations, and what drives them? In particular, I’m interested in the determinants of moral decision-making and decision-making under uncertainty. The former concerns situations where individual choices might have consequences for other living creatures, while the latter concerns situations where the consequences of decisions are not known with certainty in advance. What makes it particularly interesting for me is that those situations relate to almost all relevant decisions made by individuals in reality.

What is your approach to these questions?

I’m most excited about combining theoretical insights with experimental evidence. That is, bringing together economic modeling and experimental methods to gain new insights into the process of human decision-making in different contexts.

Can you give an example?

In a joint paper with my advisor Armin Falk, as well as Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, we use a model to show that individuals’ answers in morally sensitive choices can generally differ from their preferences or “true” moral types if people have reputational concerns. By reputational concerns we mean the desire of people to see themselves, and be seen by others, as a “good person.” As the mo­del makes clear, such tendencies interact with different methods of asking moral questions, generating interesting predictions on the frequency of moral behavior.

How did you test those predictions?

We conducted an experiment where participants face moral choices that have the following options: one option is to trigger a donation to help patients suffering from tuberculosis. The other is to take money for themselves. In one condition, participants made this choice privately, while in another, their choices were observed by multiple other persons. 

What was the outcome of the experiment?

We indeed find evidence for the predi­ctions by the model. We compare two methods commonly used to infer moral preferences from choices. In one method, participants make multiple choices for different sums of money, and only one is potentially implemented with real consequences. In the other method, participants face a single choice for a fixed monetary amount. Presenting multiple choices leads to more donation decisions compared to a single choice – but only if choices are observed by other persons. If choices are made in private, the opposite is true: then presenting a single choice generates more donations. 

What do these findings tell us?

The results may give guidance for the design of questions and choices when the aim is to maximize moral or prosocial behavior such as donations. At the same time, they provide a caveat for those experiments and contingent-valuation surveys that aim at categorizing people by their “true” moral types.

How to manage the COVID-19 transition effectively

Governments around the world have implemented measures to manage the transmission of COVID-19. While the majority of these measures are proving effective, they have a high social and economic cost, and response strategies are being adjusted. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that communities should have a voice, be informed and engaged, and participate in this transition phase.

A group of 32 experts, including briq’s Armin Falk, has therefore proposed ten considerations to support this principle: (1) implement a phased approach to a ‘new normal’; (2) balance individual rights with the social good; (3) prioritize people at highest risk of negative consequences; (4) provide special support for healthcare workers and care staff; (5) build, strengthen and maintain trust; (6) enlist existing social norms and foster healthy new norms; (7) increase resilience and self-efficacy; (8) use clear and positive language; (9) anticipate and manage misinformation; and (10) engage with media outlets. The transition phase should also be informed by real-time data according to which governmental responses should be updated.

The paper was published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Peter Andre wins Reinhard Selten Scholarship

briq student fellow Peter Andre has been awarded the Reinhard Selten Scholarship by the German Association for Experimental Economic Research (GfeW). Established in 2019, the scholarship provides financial support to junior researchers working in the field of experimental economics. In a competitive process, three project proposals were selected for funding in 2020.

Peter Andre

Peter Andre’s project looks into “Redistributive Behavior When Circumstances Shape Choices.” The common distinction between fair inequality based on choices and unfair inequality based on circumstances neglects that choices and circumstances are inherently related: Choices typically depend strongly on circumstances. In an experiment with a large representative sample from the United States, the briq researcher studies how the effect of circumstances on choices influences redistributive behavior and positive fairness views. He explores and contrasts two important mechanisms: inferences about the role of circumstances and redistributive preferences.

briq student fellow portraits: Felix Chopra

The briq scholarship program supports about 25 Ph.D. students at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics. Some of them are directly involved in briq research activities. In a series of short portraits, the briq newsroom introduces our student fellows and what they do. One of them is Felix Chopra, who has been at briq since October 2016.

What are your main research interests?

My current research focuses mostly on improving our understanding of media markets and how media content shapes people’s beliefs, preferences and behavior. From print news to social media, people receive a substantial amount of information from the media. We learn about politics or the state of the economy from the news; about cultural norms, values and stereotypes from the behavior of movie characters and the opinions people express online. Research has shown that such media exposure can affect people’s decisions in many domains such as voting, gender attitudes or consumption. That’s why I think understanding the demand and supply of media content is an exciting topic to work on.

How does your research fit in?

For example, in a current project with Ingar Haaland and Chris Roth, we examine whether the desire for more information is people’s dominant motive for reading economic and political news. In our experiment, we vary people’s beliefs about the informativeness of a newspaper and study how their demand for news from this outlet responds to these changes. If people value more informative news, policies designed to increase competition should improve the quality of the press because they increase the incentives to deliver the product that consumers want. However, if people want to read news that align with their political views, the consequences of such policies are more difficult to predict.

And what do you find?

Behavioral motives other than the desire for more information play an important role in shaping news consumption.

In the experiment, people who learn that a newspaper is more informative reduce their demand for news. Moreover, in a separate experiment we show that learning that a newspaper is more likely to make false claims in its political reporting does not decrease people’s demand for news from this outlet. This suggests that behavioral motives other than the desire for more information play an important role in shaping news consumption.

How has briq contributed to your research?

I think the greatest benefit is that we have many outstanding researchers visit briq all year round. This is a great opportunity to discuss research ideas and start collaborations. In fact, I met one of my co-authors while he was visiting briq.

The dynamics of motivated beliefs

A key question in the literature on motivated reasoning and self-deception is how motivated beliefs are sustained in the presence of feedback. In a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review, briq Research Director Florian Zimmermann explores dynamic motivated belief patterns after feedback.

Florian Zimmermann

Using a series of experiments with more than 700 participants, he establishes that positive feedback has a persistent effect on beliefs. Negative feedback, instead, influences beliefs in the short run, but this effect fades over time.

Zimmermann investigates the mechanisms of this dynamic pattern, and provides evidence for an asymmetry in the recall of feedback. Finally, he establishes that in line with theoretical accounts, incentives for belief accuracy mitigate the role of motivated reasoning.

briq student fellow portraits: Klara Röhrl

The briq scholarship program supports about 25 Ph.D. students at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics. Some of them are directly involved in briq research activities. In a series of short portraits, the briq newsroom introduces our student fellows and what they do. One of them is Klara Röhrl, who has been at briq since October 2016.

What are your main research topics?

I am very interested in equality of opportunity – the question to what degree the circumstances into which you are born determine your chances in life. There is a growing public debate on the rise of inequality both in Europe and the United States. However, I think most people don’t care so deeply about income inequality in itself. Rather, we care about it because we feel that when income is distributed very unequally, so are life chances and other things we care about.

The last two decades have provided some evidence that this feeling might be right. Countries with low inequality such as Denmark or Norway have more intergenerational mobility. So, the social position of parents is less predictive of their children’s social status. Similarly, countries with high inequality, such as the United States, also have more inequality in other important dimensions such as life expectancy. To me, the important question is: what can we do, as a society, to give everyone the chance to lead a good life.

What are you currently working on?

In a project with Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse and Pia Pinger, we study how life satisfaction develops during childhood and adolescence. Using the briq family panel – a unique longitudinal data set of children and their families – we analyze to what extent socio-economic background influences how children’s life satisfaction develops during adolescence.

It turns out that socio-economic background does not seem to play a role for children’s life satisfaction when they are in primary school and most children are very satisfied with their lives. However, as they grow older, disadvantaged children become increasingly less satisfied with their lives than their more advantaged peers.

What is unique about this dataset?

In my view, there are three features that make the briq family panel stand out. First, the children in the panel have so far been interviewed up to seven times since they were eight. I’m not aware of any other dataset that interviews children from such an early age onward for such a long time.

Second, the dataset looks at children’s development from different, complementary perspectives. On the one hand, this is done by asking a wide array of questions on the children’s personality and socio-emotional development and life circumstances. On the other hand, for many important concepts both parents and children are asked to rate the child, and if possible, children play incentivized games to get a completely objective measurement.

Third, a subset of the children whose families were classified to have low socio-economic status were randomized to participate in a mentoring program for one year. This randomized control trial together with the longitudinal nature and rich data on children’s development allows us to track the long-term impacts of the intervention and provide evidence on whether the social environment can make a difference.

Can you give an example of previous research that inspired your PhD studies?

There is a long-standing working paper by Markus Jäntti and co-authors, in which they contrast mobility between the United States, the United Kingdom and several northern European countries. This really made me think about the role social policy can play in leveling the playing field.