Discussion Paper No. 575
June 3, 2026
Talking Across the Aisle
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Abstract:
We conduct an experiment that engages U.S. Democrats and Republicans in video conversations about policy-relevant facts. We study self-selection into conversations and their effect on information aggregation and affective polarization. Participants prefer co-partisan conversations, believing cross-partisan conversations to be less informative and less pleasant. There is more to learn from counter-partisans, but participants find it harder to extract knowledge from them. Our rich audiovisual data reveal that co- and cross-partisan conversations are strikingly similar in content and tone. Yet, knowledge extraction is impeded by participants' persistent lack of trust in the knowledge of counter-partisans. In contrast, cross-partisan interactions prove more enjoyable than anticipated and significantly reduce affective polarization, an effect that persists in an obfuscated follow-up survey three months later. More emotionally engaged conversations produce larger reductions in affective polarization. Policies encouraging cross-partisan interactions may be more successful at reducing affective polarization than at promoting information aggregation.
Keywords:
cross-partisan interactions; partisan sorting; echo chambers; information diffusion; affective polarization; misperceptions;
JEL-Classification:
C93; D83; D9;
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Discussion Paper No. 574
June 1, 2026
Social Anxiety and Evaluative Interviews
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Abstract:
Evaluative social interactions are pervasive in labor markets. Inequality in these settings can arise not only from how individuals are treated or perform when evaluated, but from whether they enter evaluation at all. We study these margins in the context of social anxiety. In a controlled online experiment (N = 922), applicants decide whether to complete a live video interview that determines a monetary hiring bonus. We find that inequities associated with social anxiety are concentrated in participation rather than in performance or treatment. Socially anxious applicants are substantially less willing to interview, hold more pessimistic beliefs about being hired, and correctly anticipate a worse experience. Yet they perform no worse and are evaluated no differently. Interview experience does not attenuate the relative pessimism of socially anxious individuals, a pattern that is inconsistent with Bayesian updating under comparable signals. We use our rich audio-visual data and open-ended reflection texts to show that, instead, socially anxious applicants interpret similar interactions more negatively. We then provide evidence on organizational interventions aimed at closing social anxiety gaps. Finally, we show that social anxiety explains a meaningful share of inequalities commonly attributed to gender and social skill differences and is associated with significant earnings gaps in national data.
Keywords:
social anxiety; job interviews; beliefs; mental health; discrimination; learning;
JEL-Classification:
D83; J71; I10; C90;
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Discussion Paper No. 572
May 14, 2026
Some Simple Economics of Green Markets
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Abstract:
Policymakers seek to reduce environmentally harmful production by leveraging consumers' demand for low-externality products. Should the exchange of such products be organized under the standard principle of ``one market for one good", creating a separate market for green goods and integrating regional green markets? We show that this reduces harmful production if and only if green demand is sufficiently strong relative to green supply. Otherwise, a ``demand displacement effect" arises: stronger demand for green goods induces substitution toward brown goods, thereby increasing externalities. This effect interacts with other policy instruments.
Keywords:
green markets; socially responsible consumers; externalities; market segmentation; demand displacement; environmental policy;
JEL-Classification:
D62; D64; Q58;
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Discussion Paper No. 570
April 15, 2026
Open Science in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften: Transparenz, Reproduzierbarkeit und Zugang
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Abstract:
Der Beitrag diskutiert Open Science in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften als Bündel von Praktiken zur Verbesserung von Transparenz, Reproduzierbarkeit und Zugänglichkeit wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Der Artikel zeigt, dass Präregistrierungen und Registered Reports, Open Data und Open Code sowie Open Access die Glaubwürdigkeit empirischer Forschung stärken können, zugleich aber disziplinspezifische Grenzen und Zielkonflikte berücksichtigen müssen. Für die Wirtschaftswissenschaften und die Forschungsförderung folgt daraus die Notwendigkeit verlässlicher Infrastrukturen, klarer Standards und nachhaltiger institutioneller Unterstützung, insbesondere für nicht-kommerzielle Open-Access-Modelle wie Diamond Open Access.
Keywords:
open science; präregistrierung; reproduzierbarkeit; open access;
JEL-Classification:
B41; C81; I23;
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Discussion Paper No. 562
January 26, 2026
A Horserace of Methods for Eliciting Induced Beliefs Online
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Abstract:
This study evaluates the effectiveness of three widely used belief elicitation methods in an online setting: the binarized scoring rule (BSR), the stochastic Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism (BDM), and unincentivized introspection. Despite the theoretical advantages of incentive-compatible methods (BSR and BDM), we find that they impose significantly higher cognitive costs on participants, requiring more time and effort to implement, without delivering clear improvements in belief accuracy. In fact, BSR systematically leads to greater errors in reported beliefs compared to introspection, while BDM also reduces accuracy, though to a lesser extent. Surprisingly, individual differences in probabilistic reasoning skills do not mitigate these errors for BSR but do help improve accuracy under BDM. Our findings suggest that simpler, unincentivized approaches may offer comparable or even superior accuracy at a lower cognitive cost. These results have broad implications for the design of experiments and the interpretation of belief data in behavioral and experimental economics.
Keywords:
belief elicitation; induced beliefs; incentives; online experiment;
JEL-Classification:
C81; C89; D83; D91;
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Discussion Paper No. 529
April 10, 2025
Correcting Consumer Misperceptions about CO2 emissions
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Policy makers frequently champion information provision about carbon impact on the premise that consumers are willing to mitigate their emissions but are poorly informed about how to do so. We empirically test this argument and reject it. We collect an extensive new dataset and find both large misperceptions of the carbon impact of different consumption behaviors and clear preferences for mitigation. Yet, in two separate experiments, we show that correcting beliefs has no effect on consumption in large representative samples. Our null results are well-powered and informative, as we target information for maximal impact. These results call into question the potential of correcting carbon footprint misperceptions as a tool to fight climate change.
Keywords:
climate change; carbon emissions; information provision; consumer behavior;
JEL-Classification:
C81; C93; D84; Q54;
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Discussion Paper No. 528
March 8, 2025
Personalized Reminders: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Voluntary Retirement Savings in Colombia
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Abstract:
A large share of the global workforce lacks access to employer-sponsored retire- ment plans. In Colombia, where labor informality is high, the government introduced the Beneficios Económicos Periódicos (BEPS) program to promote voluntary retirement savings. However, many enrollees fail to contribute regularly. We conduct a randomized controlled trial with 2,819 BEPS users, assigning them to different planning and monthly reminder treatments, where reminders are tailored in their timing. We find that personalized reminders significantly increase both the frequency and amount of savings, with individuals who recognize their forgetfulness more likely to demand reminders. Our findings highlight the role of reminders tailored to individuals’ preferred timing in sustaining engagement in voluntary savings programs.
Keywords:
retirement savings; personalized reminders; limited attention; financial inclusion;
JEL-Classification:
D91; G41; O16;
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Discussion Paper No. 489
December 29, 2023
How to Increase Public Support for Carbon Pricing
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The public acceptability of a carbon price depends on how the revenues from carbon pricing are used. In a fully incentivised experiment with a large representative sample of the German population, we compare five different revenue recycling schemes and show that support for a carbon price is maximised by a “Climate Premium” that pays a fixed, uniform, upfront payment to each person. This recycling scheme receives more support than tax and dividend schemes, than using revenues for the general budget of the government, and than earmarking revenues for environmental projects. Furthermore, we show that participants and experts underestimate the public support for carbon pricing.
Keywords:
carbon pricing; pigovian taxation; political support for carbon taxes; survey experiments;
JEL-Classification:
H23; P18; C9; D9;
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Discussion Paper No. 470
December 9, 2023
Uncertainty about Carbon Impact and the Willingness to Avoid CO2 Emissions
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With a large representative survey (N=1,128), we document that consumers are very uncertain about the emissions associated with various actions, which may affect their willingness to reduce their carbon footprint. We experimentally test two channels for the behavioural impact of such uncertainty, namely risk aversion about the impact of mitigating actions and the formation of motivated beliefs about this impact. In two large online experiments (N=2,219), participants make incentivized trade-offs between personal gain and (uncertain) carbon impact. We find no evidence that uncertainty affects individual climate change mitigation efforts through risk aversion or motivated belief channels. The results suggest that reducing consumer uncertainty through information campaigns is not a policy panacea and that communicating scientific uncertainty around climate impact need not backfire.
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JEL-Classification:
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Discussion Paper No. 461
November 24, 2023
Loss Aversion
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Abstract:
Loss aversion postulates that people prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains of equal size. It is a central part of prospect theory and, according to Daniel Kahneman, “the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics” (Kahneman, 2011, p. 300). It has powerful implications for decision theory and has been fruitfully applied in many subfields of economics. However, because the reference point is often not well defined and loss aversion interacts with other behavioral biases, there is some controversy about the concept.
Keywords:
loss aversion; reference point; prospect theory; endowment effect; decision theory; risk;
JEL-Classification: