Roberto Weber

We study whether one reason behind female underrepresentation in leadership is that female leaders are less effective at coordinating followers’ actions. Two experiments using coordination games investigate whether female leaders are less successful than males in persuading followers to coordinate on efficient equilibria. In these settings, successful coordination hinges on higher-order beliefs about the leader’s capacity to convince followers to pursue desired actions, making beliefs that women are less effective leaders potentially self-confirming. We find no evidence that such bias impacts actual leadership performance, precisely estimating the absence of a gender leadership gap. We further show that this result is surprising given experts’ priors.

We experimentally investigate the degree to which redistribution, the act of taking money from some individuals and giving it to others, affects social capital in groups. We measure social capital as the degree to which group members exhibit cooperativeness, trust and trustworthiness toward one another. Our experiment involves several rounds of real-effort production, in which we vary the degree to which individual income is redistributed at the end of each round according to either progressive or regressive redistributive policies. We find no statistically significant impacts of such experience with redistribution on any of our primary measures of social capital. Exploratory work considering heterogeneous impacts by relative income positions and using alternative measures of social capital also yields no reliable impacts.

We study consumers’ concerns for the ideological values of their market counterparts and the implications of such concerns for the public promotion of values. Using a survey and online and laboratory experiments, we find that consumers are willing to pay premiums to exchange with counterparts who demonstrate support for their values. When sellers anticipate the possibility of market exchange, they exhibit public support for consumers’ values. Our findings challenge notions that market exchange is impersonal, suggest that public value positions can provide a dimension of firm differentiation, and provide evidence that market exchange can influence public support for ideological values.

Leadership theories in sociology and psychology argue that effective leaders influence follower behavior not only through the design of incentives and institutions, but also through personal abilities to persuade and motivate. Although charismatic leadership has received considerable attention in the management literature, existing research has not yet established causal evidence for an effect of leader charisma on follower performance in incentivized and economically relevant situations. We report evidence from field and laboratory experiments that investigate whether a leader’s charisma—in the form of a stylistically different motivational speech—can induce individuals to undertake personally costly but socially beneficial actions. In the field experiment, we find that workers who are given a charismatic speech increase their output by about 17% relative to workers who listen to a standard speech. This effect is …

There is substantial evidence that women tend to support different policies and political candidates than men. Many studies also document gender differences in a variety of important preference dimensions, such as risk-taking, competition and pro-sociality. However, the degree to which differential voting by men and women is related to these gaps in more basic preferences requires an improved understanding. We conduct an experiment in which individuals in small laboratory “societies” repeatedly vote for redistribution policies and engage in production. We find that women vote for more egalitarian redistribution and that this difference persists with experience and in environments with varying degrees of risk. This gender voting gap is accounted for partly by both gender gaps in preferences and by expectations regarding economic circumstances. However, including both these controls in a regression analysis …

Economic research on gender largely focuses on biological sex, the binary classification as either a “man” or “woman.” We investigate the value of incorporating a measure of continuous gender identity (CGI) into economics by exploring whether it explains variation in economic preferences and behavior beyond the explanatory power of binary sex. First, we validate a novel single-item CGI measure in a survey study, showing that it correlates with measures used in gender research. Second, we use our single-item CGI measure in an incentivized laboratory experiment to assess CGI's power in explaining previously documented gender gaps in four important economic preferences.

Previous research in economics, social psychology, and sociology has produced compelling evidence that social norms influence behavior. In this paper we apply the Krupka and Weber (2013) norm elicitation procedure and present U.S. and non-U.S. born subjects with two scenarios for which tipping and punctuality norms are known to vary across countries. We elicit shared beliefs by having subjects match appropriateness ratings of different actions (such as arriving late or on time) to another randomly selected participant from the same university or to a participant who is born in the same country. We also elicit personal beliefs without the matching task. We test whether the responses from the coordination task can be interpreted as social norms by comparing responses from the coordination game with actual social norms (as identified using independent materials such as tipping guides for travelers). We …

We investigate whether income growth causes an increased concern for mitigating negative externalities from consumption. We conduct laboratory market experiments in which firms and consumers can exchange products that differ in the degree to which they diminish negative external impacts at the expense of higher production costs. Our treatments exogenously vary consumers’ income. The data indicate that growth in consumer income causes an increase in the share of socially responsible consumption. Such a causal relationship is important from a policy perspective, as it implies that some negative external impacts of consumption activity can be mitigated as societies experience economic growth.

We study fairness views about the allocation of production output between different input factors, in particular labor and capital. We also investigate whether fairness such views predict policy preferences in relevant domains. We address this question in the context of the Swiss initiative to increase taxes on capital revenue in Switzerland that will be voted on the 26th of September 2021. According to the proposal, if the majority of Swiss voters accept the initiative, then capital income that exceeds a certain threshold amount would be taxed 1.5 times higher than labor income. Here, we outline our analysis plan.

There are, of course, huge literatures on culture and on strategy, but the intersection between these literatures is much smaller. Whereas global strategy has given culture a central role in the analysis of multinational firms and comparative business systems, the rest of the strategy literature has afforded culture a much smaller role. Our view is that culture and strategy have natural connections, that their interactions are important, and that a better understanding of culture at multiple levels would be fruitful for strategy research. Before considering strategy, we sketch what we mean by “culture.” We do not hope to provide a definition encompassing all extant usages but instead highlight two elements that are critical for strategy. First, culture is shared among a group of individuals; an individual alone cannot have culture. As we discuss, both the level at which culture is shared and what exactly is shared represent important …

We study whether employment history provides information about a worker’s “work attitude”, that is, the tendency to act cooperatively and reliably in the workplace. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, frequent job changes can indicate poor work attitude and that this information is transmitted through employment histories. We find support for this hypothesis across three studies that employ complementary laboratory, field, and survey experiments, as well as in labor market panel data. First, a tightly controlled laboratory labor market experiment demonstrates that prior employment information allows employers to screen for reliable and cooperative workers and that these workers obtain better employment outcomes. Secondly, we conduct a field experiment that varies the frequency of job changes in applicants’ resumes and find that those with fewer job changes receive substantially more callbacks from …

Beliefs about collective outcomes, such as economic growth or firm profitability, play an important role in many contexts. We study biases in the formation of such beliefs. Specifically, we explore whether over-optimism and self-serving biases in information processing—documented for beliefs about individual outcomes—affect beliefs about collective outcomes. We find that people indeed exhibit self-serving biases for collective outcomes, and that such biases are similar to biases for individual outcomes. In addition, we investigate whether collective self-delusion is mitigated by market institutions. If anything, biases in information processing are more pronounced in the presence of a market.

Most institutions are limited in scope. We study experimentally how enforcement institutions affect behavior, preferences, and beliefs beyond their direct influence over the behaviors they control. Groups play two identical public good games, with cooperation institutionally enforced in one game. Institutions generally have economically significant positive spillover effects to the unregulated game. We also observe that institutions enhance conditional cooperation preferences and beliefs about others’ cooperativeness, suggesting that both factors are drivers of observed spillover effects. In additional treatments, we provide evidence for several factors, including characteristics of institutions, that enhance or limit the effectiveness and scope of spillover effects. (JEL C92, D02, D83, D91, H41)

We investigate ‘social credibility’, a leader’s ability to convince followers that conditions are favourable and that others will follow the leader's advice. To do so, we study an experimental joint venture with three key properties: returns are uncertain, investments are complements, and investment is often more beneficial for the leader than the followers. The leader has private information about investment returns and can facilitate coordination through cheap-talk recommendations. We find that leaders manage social credibility by forgoing potentially profitable advice to invest, increasing the likelihood that subsequent recommendations are followed. We identify factors that affect the persistence of social credibility.

Das von allen Professorinnen und Professoren des Department of Economics unterzeichnete Positionspapier fasst den gegenwärtigen Konsens der ökonomischen Debatte zusammen und zeigt Handlungsoptionen für die Schweiz auf.

We investigate the causal impact of public discourse on socially responsible market behavior. We conduct laboratory market experiments with products that differ in their production costs and social impact, and provide market actors and impacted third parties with the opportunity to discuss appropriate market behavior. Across two studies that vary characteristics of the discourse, the external impact and the participants, we find that public discourse substantially increases market social responsibility. Our findings suggest that discussions and campaigns focusing on appropriate market behavior can be powerful tools for shaping responsible norms governing market conduct and addressing inefficiencies due to market failures.

We experimentally study whether individuals adopt negative beliefs about others' intentions to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study compares the beliefs held by players with such an incentive to the beliefs of neutral observers and finds no evidence that individuals engage in “strategic cynicism.” This contrasts with other recent evidence demonstrating that people hold less positive beliefs about others when doing so allows them to act more self-interestedly. We reconcile the discrepancy, using a simple model of belief manipulation and a novel experiment that replicates and extends the earlier findings. Across three datasets, we find no evidence of negatively biased beliefs in absolute terms. However, those with a greater incentive to view others' intentions cynically exhibit relatively less positive beliefs. Our contribution expands our understanding of the psychological forces underlying self-serving belief …

We use surveys, laboratory experiments and administrative labor-market data to study how heterogeneity in the perceived immorality of work and in workers’ aversion to acting immorally interact to impact labor market outcomes. Specifically, we investigate whether those individuals least concerned with acting morally select into jobs generally perceived as immoral and whether the aversion among many individuals to performing such acts contributes to immorality wage premiums, a form of compensating differential. We show that immoral work is associated with higher wages, both using correlational evidence from administrative labor-market data and causal evidence from a laboratory experiment. We also measure individuals’ aversion to performing immoral acts and show that those who find immoral behavior least aversive are more likely to be employed in immoral work in the lab and have a relative preference for work perceived as immoral outside the laboratory. We note that sorting by “immoral” types into jobs that can cause harm may be detrimental for society. Our study highlights the value of employing complementary research methods.

This chapter reviews recent developments in the extensive and growing experimental literature on coordination games. Coordination is necessary whenever there exist multiple equilibria, and standard equilibrium analysis fails to yield clear behavioral predictions. The lack of theoretical traction makes coordination games frustrating for theorists, as evidenced by the considerable and prominent efforts to replace pesky multiplicity with uniqueness (Harsanyi and Selten 1988; Carlsson and Van Damme 1993; Monderer and Shapley 1996). However, the multiplicity of equilibria and the lack of crisp predictions also create opportunities for experiments to determine which equilibria arise when people play these games and thereby provide valuable insights into human behavior. Economists’ interest in coordination games is not purely theoretical. The absence of any clear means of predicting what will happen based on …

The fields of leadership and economics have interacted very little until now. The aim of this special issue on “economics and leadership” is to demonstrate the potential benefits of paying attention to and incorporating economic perspectives and methods into leadership research. Specifically, we argue that the field of economics can advance leadership research on three main topics: concepts, causality and context. For each topic, we summarize the state-of-the-art literature and showcase important insights, tools and findings. We also discuss possible critiques of the economic perspective on leadership. The timeliness of this issue is evident from recent discussions on the three C's within the field of leadership research, not least within The Leadership Quarterly itself. Our paper as well as the other six papers in this issue demonstrates that narrowing the gap between economics and leadership is not only beneficial …