Publications in Refereed Journals
Stress and Risk – Preferences versus Noise (2022)
(with Elle Parslow)
Judgment and Decision Making
Bubbles and Financial Professionals (2019)
(with Weitzel, U., Huber, C., Huber, J., Kirchler, M., Lindner, F.)
Review of Financial Studies
Ready-made oTree apps for time preference elicitation methods (2019)
(with Rose, M.)
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance
Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015 (2018)
(with Camerer, C., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Ho, T.-H., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., Kirchler, M., Nave, G., Nosek, B., Pfeiffer, T., Altmejd, A., Buttrick, N., Chan, T., Chen, Y., Forsell, E., Gampa, A., Heikenstein, E., Hummer, L., Taisuke, I., Isaksson, S., Manfredi, D., Wagenmakers, E., and Wu, H.)
Nature Human Behaviour
No need for more time: Intertemporal allocation decisions under time pressure (2017)
(with Lindner, F.)
Journal of Economic Psychology
Working Papers
Individual attitudes and market dynamics towards imprecision
(with Christoph Huber)
Reject & Resubmit, Journal of Financial Markets
We analyze the impact of individual attitudes on market dynamics in a laboratory experiment with 320 participants under risk and imprecision, where imprecision is modelled in either probabilities, outcome realizations, or a combination of both. In two stages, we first elicit individual reservation prices for risky and imprecise lotteries and then analyze price dynamics in a continuous double auction environment with risky and imprecise fundamentals. Our results underpin the importance of whether imprecision is modelled in probabilities or outcomes on the individual level: On average, we find imprecision-in-outcomes seeking, but neutrality towards imprecision in probabilities, the combination of probabilities and outcomes, and risk. In markets, however, individual attitudes are overridden by market dynamics as past price developments are the main predictor for current realized prices. We find no significant differences between treatments with respect to market variables such as trading volume, volatility, and the dispersion of final asset holdings. Yet, at the market closing, we observe significant overpricing in the risk condition, as well as underpricing in conditions with imprecision in probabilities (supporting ambiguity aversion) and the combination of imprecise probabilities and outcomes, respectively.
Client-Advisor Matching in the Finance Industry
Under Review
In an experimental study with 567 subjects from the general population and a pool of financial professionals, we introduce a novel matching procedure to assign advisors to clients. This matching is based on two simple measures for risk-return attitudes and the risk bearing capacity. Our findings show that similarity between clients and advisors in those risk measures is not only the desired mechanism by clients, but also significantly increases the delegation probability of investment decisions as well as overall client satisfaction. Additionally, we find that advisors are both willing and able to incorporate clients’ risk attitudes in their investment decisions on the clients’ behalf. A potential drawback of such a matching mechanism is that advisors have incentives to misrepresent their own attitudes if they compete for clients, given that their risk attitudes are significantly different from the general population. The experimental results do not show evidence of this effect in practice, providing support for the stability of the proposed mechanism.
Overview of experimental results for participating financial professionals (in German):
Status and Reputation Nudging
(with Michael Kirchler and Stefan Palan)
Under Review
We conduct a natural field experiment with 808 insurance brokers to test the effects of compliments including status or reputation nudges on reciprocal behavior. We send e-mail requests to insurance brokers asking them to share their expertise on specialist issues. Compared to a neutral request, we find that reputation nudges significantly increase brokers’ response rates and ultimately their willingness to follow through with an initial positive response. We find suggestive evidence for status nudges having a similar impact. These findings hold for several specifications, such as different geographical areas, and for brokers employed with large companies.
Selected Work in Progress
Large gains, small losses? (Mis)representing returns in financial advice
(with Christoph Huber)
Manuscript in preparation
Price Paths, Stress, and Evaluation Periods
Manuscript in preparation
Julia Elisabeth Rose 