Christiane SchwierenUniversität Heidelberg · Alfred Weber Institute of Economics
Christiane Schwieren
PhD
About
59
Publications
15,713
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,144
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Christiane Schwieren currently works at the Alfred Weber Institute of Economics, Universität Heidelberg. Christiane does research in Neuroeconomics, Experimental Economics and Behavioural Economics. She currently focuses on Stress and Gender related research.
Additional affiliations
September 2003 - September 2006
Publications
Publications (59)
We discuss the results of an experimental public good game with group representatives in Germany and Japan, societies with varying levels of individualism. Representatives are permitted to communicate with their constituencies, but not with other representatives. We focus on accountability between representative and his constituency and on the risk...
Experimental evidence for anti-social preferences has been identified in studies employing economic destruction games; in these games, some subjects destroy other subjects’ incomes without receiving any material benefit, and they may even incur costs in doing so. Here, we study the robustness of this phenomenon. We introduce a four-player destructi...
Depression in the workplace is a significant factor for reduced personal well-being and productivity. Consequently, this has negative effects on the economic success of the companies in which depressed people are employed. In addition, the economy has to deal with the significant burden of this illness on the health system. In this paper, we invest...
Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policies. To fulfill this promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to this specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions behavior in public goods games generalizes to decisions about voluntary climate actio...
Growing interest in using personality variables in business and economic research has led to the question of whether personality, as measured by psychology, is useful to predict behavior. While personality can undoubtedly influence large-scale outcomes, it is less clear if personality variables can also be used to understand micro-behavior in games...
Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender differences in competitiveness that are observed in traditional patriarchic as well as in modern societies? We experimentally assess men's and women's preferences to compete in a traditional society where women and men have similar rights and entitlements alongside a patriarchic and a matrilineal...
Depending on the context at hand, people’s preference for receiving feedback might differ. Especially in allocation decisions that directly concern another individual, feedback from the affected person can have positive or negative value. We study such preferences in a laboratory experiment by eliciting the willingness-to-pay to receive or to avoid...
Using coordination games, we study whether social norm perception differs between inexperienced and experienced participants in economic laboratory experiments. We find substantial differences between the two groups, both regarding injunctive and descriptive social norms in the context of participation in lab experiments. By contrast, social norm p...
We study whether social norm perception in economic laboratory experiments differs between subjects that participate for the first time and subjects that already participated many times. Consistent with previous studies, inexperienced subjects pronounce egalitarianism, while experienced subjects pronounce efficiency and the maximization of their ow...
While preferences for conformity are commonly seen as an important driver of pro-social behaviour, only a small set of previous studies has explicitly tested the behavioural mechanisms underlying this proposition. In this paper, we report on two interconnected experimental studies that jointly provide a more thorough and robust understanding of a c...
Background and objectives:
Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) suffer from interpersonal difficulties. They have been shown to be distrustful and yet involved in abusive relationships. In this study, we want to examine whether the perception of fairness and partner preference are altered in BPD.
Methods:
We employed a coalition f...
Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to potentially precede both adverse psychological as well as physiological conditions, its effects on decision making have not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus on the relation between self-reported chronic stress and self-reported as we...
In the present study, we investigate how decision making under uncertainty is affected by age. We ran two experiments with young and older adults, systematically manipulating (1) uncertainty conditions (risk and ambiguity), (2) feedback on decisions and (3) requirements of the task regarding executive functions. Experiment 1 aims at investigating r...
Background and objectives:
Negative evaluation processes play a pivotal role in the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms. However, it remains to be understood, whether evaluation processes in depression are impaired by maladaptive goal setting.
Method:
In a non-clinical sample (N = 50) of individuals with high (BDI-II-Score: 13-29)...
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe and persistent impairments in interpersonal functioning. Given the complexity of social interactions, studying the interactive behavior of BPD patients is challenging. One way to implement both tight experimental control and realistic, externally valid settings is to use game-theoreti...
Chronic stress is a public health problem that affects a significant part of the population. While the physiological damage it causes is under ongoing scrutiny, its behavioral effects have been overlooked. This is one of the first studies to examine the relation between chronic stress and decision-making, using a standard lottery paradigm. We measu...
Evidence from public good game experiments holds the promise of instructive and coste effective insights to inform environmental policy-making, for example on climate change mitigation. To fulfill the promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to the specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions s...
Competition is ubiquitous in economic life. Yet, negative consequences of competitive environments have been reported and everyday experience suggests that competitive situations can be very stressful. It is, however, an open question whether or not economic competitions in the laboratory indeed elicit physiological stress reactions. Our study exam...
Many real-world decisions are made by individuals as representatives of groups. Most research, however, studies either individuals or groups as decision-makers. This paper explores whether there is a general difference between a decision made as an individual and as a representative of a group in the context of a public good game. We conducted a se...
Evidence from public good game experiments holds the promise of instructive and cost-effective insights to inform environmental policy-making, for example on climate change mitigation. To fulfill the promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to the specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions su...
Previous studies on attentional biases often show contradictory results. This suggests that important moderating variables have been neglected so far. We suggest that (1) control over potential consequences and (2) satisfaction with the current status are important factors that need to be considered. We explored the influence of these variables usi...
Given the coincidence of the demographic change and climate change in the upcoming decades the aging voter gains increasing importance in climate change mitigation and adaptation processes. It is generally assumed that information status and comprehension of complex processes underlying climate change are prerequisites for adopting pro-environmenta...
Economic decisions are often made in stressful situations (e.g., at the trading floor), but the effects of stress on economic decision making have not been systematically investigated so far. The present study examines how acute stress influences economic decision making under uncertainty (risk and ambiguity) using financially incentivized lotterie...
Imitating the best strategy from the previous period has been shown to be an important heuristic, in particular in relatively complex environments. In this experiment we test whether subjects are more likely to use imitation if they are under stress. Subjects play a repeated Cournot oligopoly. Treatments are time pressure within the task and distra...
In an aging society, understanding the mechanisms underlying age differences in decision making becomes increasingly important. In the present study, a group of young adults (< 30 years, N = 25) and a group of older adults (> 58 years, N = 21) performed a task investigating decision making under uncertainty while brain activity was measured using f...
We analyze the gender wage gap in experimental markets. Women receive but do not request significantly lower wages than men. This hurts firms, as women react with low effort. Additionally, women tend to react differently than men to wage levels.
Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted that personality can influence large-scale economic o...
The “aging employee” has recently become a hot topic in many fields of behavioural research. With the aim to determine the effects of different incentive schemes (competition, social or increased monetary incentives) on performance of young and older subjects, we look at behaviour of a group of younger and older adults on a well-established real ef...
Zwei Trends werden in den kommenden Jahrzehnten in beunruhigender Weise aufeinandertreffen: der globale Klimawandel und der demografische Wandel hin zu einer immer älter werdenden Bevölkerung. Gerade die Älteren aber sind es, die über die materiellen Ressourcen verfügen, um die drohenden Folgen des Klimawandels zum Wohle der jungen Generationen zu...
There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men (e.g., Gneezy et al.(2003), Niederle and Vesterlund (2007)). In this paper, we use personality variables to understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter a competition or avoid it. We use the Big Five persona...
Gneezy et al. (2003) offer a partial explanation for the wage gap between men and women. In an experiment they found that women react less to competitive incentives. The task they used in their experiment can however be considered a male task. We replicate the experiment and extend it by treatments with a gender-neutral task and a female task. For...
According to social-psychological research, feelings of uncertainty in decision-making evoke two opposite responses: (i) reduction of uncertainty by information search, leading to less stereotyping of people, and hence less discrimination; (ii) social identification with an ingroup, inducing more reliance on stereotypic perceptions and prejudices,...
In an aging society, it becomes more and more important to understand how aging affects decision making. Older adults have to face many situations that require consequential financial decisions. In the present study, we examined the effects of aging on decisions in two domains of uncertainty: risk and ambiguity. For this purpose, a group of young a...
Decision-makers are sometimes influenced by the way in which choice situations are presented to them or "framed." If such framing effects were strong and pervasive, this would imply an important challenge to the social sciences, since it would make it difficult to study human behavior in a synthetic or theoretic manner. We study the impact of frame...
This study examines mechanisms underlying nationality-based discrimination from two different perspectives: social psychology and microeconomics. The authors studied 91 teams in a binational setting that were offered a new team member. National composition of the team and nationality of the new member were manipulated. Overall, the study showed tha...
We examine gender differences in trust in another party's cooperation (CC) or its ability (AC). While men and women do not differ concerning trust in cooperation, gender has a strong influence when trust in another subject's ability is required.
In this paper, we experimentally test whether competing for a desired reward does not only affect individuals’ performance, but also their tendency to cheat. Recent doping scandals in sports as well as forgery and plagiarism scandals in academia have been partially explained by “competitive pressures”, which suggests a link between competition and...
The introduction of the euro gave a unique opportunity to empirically disentangle two components of utility: intrinsic value,
a rational component central in economics, and the numerosity effect (going by numbers while ignoring units), a descriptive
and irrational component central in prospect theory and underlying the money illusion. We measured r...
Decision-makers are sometimes influenced by the way in which choice situations are presented to them or "framed" This can be seen as an important challenge to the social sciences, since strong and pervasive framing effects would make it difficult to study human behavior in a synthetic or theoretic manner. We present results from experiments with di...
This is a study about the possibility of self-governance. We designed two versions of a step-level public good game, with or without a centralized sanctioning mechanism (CSM). In a baseline treatment participants play 14 rounds of the non-CSM game. In an automatic removal (AR) treatment participants play 7 rounds with CSM plus 7 rounds without CSM....
Social-psychological research reveals two opposite ways in which a person can respond to increased feelings of uncertainty in decision-making. First, he (or she) may try to reduce his uncertainty by searching for more specific information. This leads to less stereotyping and discrimination. Second, he may identify more strongly with a salient socia...
Economic theory argues that competition can diminish discrimination in the labor market, while arguments from social psychology’s social-identity theory point into the opposite direction. We ran two experiments to test the psychological predictions in an ‘economic’ setting. Participants were categorized artificially and played a team game, facing e...
The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage for billions of people. Heavy central bank intervention...
Experimental evidence on gender differences demonstrates that women are generally less trusting and more reciprocating than men in Investment Games. However, existing studies typically use a narrow population consisting of college students. To test the robustness of these findings, we report on an experiment using 18-84-year old participants recrui...
The authors suggest a theory that predicts how summary evaluations about targets are implicitly formed and stored in memory and under which conditions they are used in attitude judgment. First, it is assumed that the mere encoding of value-charged stimuli is a sufficient condition to initiate implicit online formation of summary evaluations. Second...
â–º We analyze the question why women avoid to enter a competiton. â–º We use the Big Five personality variables to understand the underlying causes. â–º Performance in a competitive setting is negatively influenced by neuroticism. â–º The gender difference in entering a competiton is mediated by neuroticism. â–º Those highest in neuroticism seem t...
Projects
Project (1)
The joint research project DATABLIC is focused on the question of how public funders could and should design their funding policies and grant conditions in order to get funded scientists to share their data in a systematic and reliable way with the scientific community. How is it possible to ascertain that “raw”-data and sufficient information about tools of analysis and methods be made accessible and usable? And how can policies respect the (legitimate) interests of different stakeholder? The aim of the project is to develop practical policy recommendations for public funders (in Germany).
DATABLIC is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) via the program „Forschung zu ethischen, rechtlichen und sozialen Aspekten (ELSA) der Digitalisierung, von Big Data und Künstlicher Intelligenz in der Gesundheitsforschung und -versorgung“ (Research on Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Digitization, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Health Research).
The project brings together four disciplines – ethics, social sciences, law, and behavioural economics – that are dedicated to four sub-projects.
Project Speaker: Dr. phil. Christoph Schickhardt
