Benno Torgler

• Professor at Queensland University of Technology

https://arcbita.org/ Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of ARC Training Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption (BITA). Research published in this series may discuss policy implications, but BITA does not endorse any specific policy positions. BITA is committed to the highest...

This study explores the dynamics of democratic systems under the threat of backsliding into "rigged" democracies. Democratic systems, even when mature, remain vulnerable to the interplay of rising polarization, institutional erosion, and uneven electoral processes. This paper develops a theoretical model integrating three core variables: (1) Instit...

Let’s enjoy (or not) what happens when a group of economists, psychologists, and decision scientists come together to debate a simple coin-toss gamble. This dialogue embarks on a journey exploring the relevance of expected utility theory alongside alternative frameworks championed by fields like behavioral economics. Along the way, it occasionally...

Citizen tax compliance significantly dictates governmental fiscal capacities. Therefore, understanding the differences in individuals’ tax compliance attitudes remains paramount. Utilizing three online surveys, we develop a taxpayer typology based on a factor and a cluster analysis. Our findings underscore that taxpayers can be classified into two...

Mating and labor markets are fundamental drivers of societal dynamics. Yet, equity of access to these domains differs between the sexes due to numerous biological, economic, psychological, and socio-cultural factors. These inequalities and their impacts can accentuate perceptions, preferences, and behaviors of males and females in different ways. U...

This study explores the factors leading to the addition of references to the editorial board in economics journals after the latest working paper version. It also documents a novel methodology for automating the recognition of added references between working papers and their published counterparts. We hypothesise that the ratio of added references...

Purpose This study aims to explore Augmented Language Models (ALMs) for synthetic data generation in services marketing and research. It evaluates ALMs' potential in mirroring human responses and behaviors in service scenarios through comparative analysis with five empirical studies. Design/methodology/approach The study uses ALM-based agents to c...

This paper advocates for the reinstatement of the Francis A. Walker Medal, arguing for its critical role in complementing the Nobel Prize in Economics by recognizing a broader and more diverse spectrum of contributions within the field. By revisiting the legacies of eminent economists such as Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, and Wesley Clair Mitchell, th...

Brand managers have to allocate limited resources between developing new brand extensions and supporting parent brands. We contribute by demonstrating how social media engagement can be optimised by creating a fit between social media language and extensions versus parent brands. This is important given that literature suggests that (a) extensions...

Despite the great promises and potential of quantum computing, the full range of possibilities and practical applications is not yet clear. In this contribution, we highlight the potential for quantum theories and computation to reignite the art and science of expert systems and knowledge engineering. With their grounding in uncertainty and unpredi...

A large portion of the American electorate holds contempt for elected representatives who skip floor votes. As a result, political challengers, and the national political media in the U.S., rarely miss a chance to inform the electorate of the shirking behavior of its representatives. New research suggests that, in 2020, the leadership of the U.S. H...

Science has been an incredibly powerful and revolutionary force. However, it is not clear whether science is suited to performance under pressure; generally, science achieves best in its usual comfort zone of patience, caution, and slowness. But, if science is organized knowledge and acts as a guiding force for making informed decisions, it is impo...

Traditional survey methods can provide noisy data arising from recall, memory and other biases. Technological advances (particularly in neuroscience) are opening new ways of monitoring physiological processes through non-intrusive means. Such dense continuous data provide new and fruitful avenues for complementing self-reported data with a better u...

Commemorative stamps have a place in the cultural, economic, and geopolitical status of a nation; and what is printed on stamps often reflects a country’s culture, regime, and values. Whilst stamps can celebrate monuments, flora and fauna, and points in a nation’s history; they are also a source of recognition, celebrating the contribution of key f...

This study investigates the potential relationship between scientific success and lifespan, with a particular focus on whether serving as President of the Royal Society is associated with a longer lifespan. Previous research has indicated that higher social status can confer health benefits, but it remains unclear whether holding leadership positio...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several governments tried to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, with lockdowns that prohibited leaving one’s residence unless carrying out a few essential services. We investigate the relationship between limitations to mobility and mental health in the UK during the first year and a half...

This paper advocates for the reinstatement of the Francis A. Walker Medal, arguing for its critical role in complementing the Nobel Prize in Economics by recognizing a broader and more diverse spectrum of contributions within the field. By revisiting the legacies of eminent economists such as Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, and Wesley Clair Mitchell, th...

Using data from the World Values Survey, we show that individuals who speak a language in which the same word is used for both (financial) debt and (moral) guilt have a statistically significant and economically meaningful lower likelihood of borrowing money. This relationship holds even after controlling for a range of covariates, fixed effects, g...

There is an urgent need to transition our economy, society, and culture towards systems and actions that facilitate ecological sustainability. Such radical change requires equally radical transformation of approaches to decision making and resource use. Sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) is often presented as the answer to meeting the triple‐bottom‐...

This chapter examines the exciting possibilities promised for the sports environment by new technologies such as big data, AI, and quantum computing, discussed in turn. Together and separately, the technologies’ capacity for more precise data collection and analysis can enhance sports-related decision-making and increase organization performance in...

This research delves into the phenomenon of citation errors in academia, focusing on a specific case where renowned behavioural economist George Loewenstein incorrectly attributed a quote to William Stanley Jevons instead of his son Herbert Stanley Jevons. This unique setting serves as a “radioactive tracer” to investigate the presence of intention...

There is a burgeoning literature that investigates the effects of religion on relationship dissolution. This study is distinguished from prior scholarship in three broad areas: The investigation estimates the effect of religion on relationship stability using multiple measures of religious affiliation and religious observance; it is based on inform...

Purpose Misinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations...

Vaccination is a pressing public health issue. We hypothesize that impatience (discounting future benefits of current actions) leads to lower vaccination rates and worse attitudes toward vaccines. In preregistered individual-level Study 1 ( N = 2,614), we document a positive and quantitatively small association (standardized coefficient = 0.06) bet...

After major adversity, some people rely on their religious faith and networks for comfort, support, and material goods and services. Consistent with this behavior are findings that adversity has a positive causal effect on the importance of religion in people's lives. Using a large high‐frequency US dataset, we estimate the causal effects of natura...

Research question: In this study, we add to the slowly emerging literature on modeling the demand for women's sports by exploring the robustness of the determinants for women's volleyball – previously a largely neglected team sport – across three different distribution channels, i.e., online streaming, TV broadcasts, and the stadium experience. Re...

This white paper presents our work on SurveyLM, a platform for analyzing augmented language models' (ALMs) emergent alignment behaviors through their dynamically evolving attitude and value perspectives in complex social contexts. Social Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, like ALMs, often function within nuanced social scenarios where there is n...

We have a limited understanding of the role emotions play in academia, as exploring emotions consistently and comparably is challenging due to the powerful influence of contextual factors. However, we have identified an interesting setting to empirically investigate the emotional response in academia by examining Nobel Prize winners. Scientists who...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...

New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study addresses this gap in the literature by empirically exploring...

This paper investigates the importance of trust in international institutions for the development of tax morale by focussing on interactions between trust in the national government and trust in the European Union (EU) or trust in the United Nations (UN). Using large-scale survey data from European countries, we provide evidence that all three trus...

This paper reports on a laboratory experiment designed specifically to test the influence of national pride on tax honesty while using a physiological marker to observe emotional responses to patriotic priming. Participants were exposed to one of three framing videos before earning income in a real effort task and were given the chance to declare t...

We study the long-term effects of the Cultural Revolution, characterised by widespread violence, summary executions and chaos, on a set of trust outcomes among people surveyed by the China Survey in 2008. We find that the revolution, identified by cohort-specific exposure to excess deaths at the county level, has a significant long-term impact on t...

Commemorative stamps have a place in the cultural, economic, and geopolitical status of a nation; and the nature of what is printed on stamps is very much a reflection of the culture, regime, and values of a country. Whilst commemorative stamps can be a source of celebration for monuments, flora and fauna, and key points in a nation’s history; they...

Commemorative stamps have a place in the cultural, economic, and geopolitical status of a nation; and the nature of what is printed on stamps is very much a reflection of the culture, regime, and values of a country. Whilst commemorative stamps can be a source of celebration for monuments, flora and fauna, and key points in a nation's history; they...

The ambiguous phenomenon of corruption has long been the cause of great theoretical debate in economics. By using Structural Equation Modelling, with the two types of corruption as a latent variable, this paper employs causal and indicative variables to the Latin American region to test for rent seeking and systemic corruption during 1980–2018. The...

Politics is a social endeavour and highly visible to the consumer (in this case, the citizen). It is therefore not surprising that a potential beauty premium has been explored in politics. However, most studies have focused on how beauty influences the success of candidates running for office, this is a distributive outcome rather than a process or...

The global under-supply of sperm and oocyte donors is a serious concern for assisted reproductive medicine. Research has explored self-selected populations of gamete donors and their ex-post rationalisations of why they chose to donate. However, such studies may not provide the necessary insight into why the majority of people do not donate. Utilis...

Despite an extensive body of research indicating multifaceted advantages for employees deemed physically attractive, factors that limit or even negate the attractiveness premium have not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we are interested in whether a rich set of physical appearance factors matter when performance information is transp...

We analyze the effect of electoral turnout on incum-bency advantages by exploring mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria. Mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the state government announced an official state of emergency. In the seco...

Self-reported subjective judgments about well-being, mood, or mental state are at the core of analytical and empirical tools in many social sciences. However, technological advances (particularly in neuroscience) are opening new ways of monitoring physiological processes through non-intrusive means. Such dense continuous data provide new and fruitf...

New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study addresses this gap in the literature by empirically exploring...

The causes, contexts, and consequences of taxpaying behaviour are perpetually important topics for policy-makers and researchers. Over previous decades, the orientation of tax policy and research has moved from an economics of crime approach to a collaborative, partnership and customer-focused approach. This chapter will examine how the emerging ev...

Research question Despite the potential importance of awards as a possible career catalyst, research on awards is still in its infancy, specifically in sports management. Here, we address this shortcoming in the sports economics and management literature by exploring data from youth association football. Research methods Estimating different probi...

Despite a solid foundation of women’s career progression research, the role of personality and psychosocial characteristics in explaining objective career success is not yet fully understood. Today, two alternative perspectives on the role of gender and personality in career advancement prevail. On the one hand, the gender-invariant role demands pe...

Increasing the tax compliance of self-employed business owners—particularly of trade-specific service providers such as those involved in construction and repair work—remains an ongoing challenge for tax authorities. From a compliance point of view, cash transactions are particularly problematic when services are paid for on the spot, as these exch...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments struggled to find the right balance between re-strictive measures to contain the spread of the virus, and the effects of these measures on people’s psychological wellbeing. This paper investigates the relationship between limitations to mobility and mental health for the UK population during the COVID-19 pa...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

As artificial intelligence (AI) thrives and propagates through modern life, a key question to ask is how to include humans in future AI? Despite human involvement at every stage of the production process from conception and design through to implementation, modern AI is still often criticized for its “black box” characteristics. Sometimes, we do no...

Using data for 387 Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, or physiology/medicine from 1901 to 2000, this study focuses on the relation between the timing of prestigious awards and human longevity. In particular, it uses a linear regression model to examine how a winner’s longevity is affected by (1) the age at which the prestigious award is won...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...

Despite the general usefulness of citations as a sort of test of the value of one’s work in the marketplace of ideas, journals and publishers tend to use alternative bases of judgment, namely committees, in selecting candidates for the conferral of journals’ best paper awards. Given that recognition—sometimes in the form of compensation and on othe...

We study the long-term effects of the Cultural Revolution, a dramatic period in the recent history of China, characterised by widespread violence, summary executions and chaos, on a set of trust outcomes among people surveyed by the China Survey in 2008. We find that the revolution, which we identify with the interaction between cohort and excess d...

The history of AI in economics is long and winding, much the same as the evolving field of AI itself. Economists have engaged with AI since its beginnings, albeit in varying degrees and with changing focus across time and places. In this study, we have explored the diffusion of AI and different AI methods (e.g., machine learning, deep learning, neu...

Despite an extensive body of research indicating multifaceted advantages for employees deemed physically attractive, factors that limit or even negate the attractiveness premium have not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we are particularly interested in whether a rich set of physical appearance factors matter when performance informat...

In this paper I discuss how Law and Economics can benefit from incorporating some insights from Public Choice into their analyses. Within this argument, I examine the evolution of experimental methods by looking at laboratory, field, and natural experiments; and conducting a very simple scientometrics analysis on the relative frequency of experimen...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have struggled to find the right balance between restrictive measures to contain the spread of the virus, and the effects of these measures on people's psychological wellbeing. This paper investigates the relationship between limitations to mobility and mental health for British population during the COVID-...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

Using data for 387 Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, or physiology/medicine from 1901 to 2000, this study focuses on the relation between the timing of prestigious awards and human longevity. In particular, it examines how a winner's longevity is affected by (1) the age at which the prestigious award is won, (2) the total number of prestig...

Love of family and loyalty to country are warm-blooded motivations that can impact the human migration decision. Our social ties and allegiances reflect where we choose to live, work, pay taxes, and contribute to community. The migration literature typically examines why people move from one place to another; in contrast, we look at why people choo...

We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialisation affect in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City on two groups of high school...

COVID-19 has had far-reaching global effects on the health and wellbeing of individuals on every continent. The economic and financial market response has been equally disastrous with high levels of volatility observed. This study explores the temporal relations between structural breaks, market volatility and government stay-at-home policy interve...

Vaccination against COVID-19 and other diseases is a pressing public health issue. We hypothesize that a short-term orientation (impatience) – as it heavily discounts the future benefits of actions taken today – leads to lower rates of vaccination. Using a recently constructed, experimentally validated measure of patience, we document four results...

The history of AI in economics is long and winding, much the same as the evolving field of AI itself. Economists have engaged with AI since its beginnings, albeit in varying degrees and with changing focus across time and places. In this study, we have explored the diffusion of AI and different AI methods (e.g., machine learning, deep learning, neu...

This study provides a quantitative assessment of the willingness to pay to avoid water use restrictions taking into account psychological, attitudinal and behavioural influences. We analyse determinants of households’ willingness to pay to ensure a continuous water supply in Brisbane, Australia. The results show that in addition to socio-economic v...