
Conny WollbrantUniversity of St Andrews
Conny Wollbrant
PhD Economics
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49
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2017 - present
March 2017 - March 2017
Publications
Publications (49)
In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a common project (i.e., cooperated) when required to decide quickly than when forced to delay their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), a pattern consistent with the “social heuristics” hypothesis proposed by Rand and colleagues. The results of studies using time pres...
We show that Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014)—who argue that cooperation is intuitive—provide an incorrect interpretation of their own data. They make the mistake of inferring intuition from relative decision times alone, without taking into account absolute decision times. We re-examine their data and find that the vast majority of their...
The article “Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation,” by Bear and Rand (1), uses game theoretic models to examine the role of intuition and deliberation in human cooperation. The premise is that dual processes characterize human social decision making: “(i) automatic, intuitive processes that are relatively effortless but inflexi...
We use a natural field experiment to investigate the hypothesis that generosity is partly involuntary, by examining whether individuals tend to avoid opportunities to act generously. In Sweden, new recycling machines for bottles and cans with an option of donating the returned deposit to charity were gradually introduced in one of the largest store...
We develop a model that relates self-control and conflict identification to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas. As predicted, we find in a laboratory public goods experiment a robust association between stronger self-control and higher levels of cooperation. This means that there is evidence for an impulse to be selfish and that cooperative be...
In recent years, there has been growing interest in capturing, manipulating, and analyzing the effects of decision-making processes that underlie economic choice. This editorial discusses these recent developments by contextualizing the six contributions to the special issue “Cognition and Economic Behavior” within the broader scope of the existing...
How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes
underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two
forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal
change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological
preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...
How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on s...
This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching...
The law of supply is a fundamental principle of economics and states that any increase in price will increase the quantity supplied. In the case of prosocial behaviour, however, increasing rewards have reduced supply, posing a challenge to standard economic theory. Attempts to study such ‘crowding-out’ have been limited by their small scale and the...
Objectives:
To examine if informing people in free-at-the-point-of-use medical systems of the financial value of medicines, and priming them with the fact that the medication is funded by taxation, influences people's perceived value and efficacy of the medicines, feelings of burdensomeness and guilt, and intended adherence.
Design:
An experimen...
How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...
How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...
How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...
Evidence of gender differences in cooperation in social dilemmas is inconclusive. This paper experimentally elicits unconditional contributions, a contribution vector (cooperative preferences), and beliefs about the level of others’ contributions in variants of the public goods game. We show that existing inconclusive results can be understood when...
The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. Although key results in this literature have failed to replicate in pre-registered studies, recent meta-analyses report an overall effect of intuition on cooperation. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four diff...
The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four different types of intuition manipulations—time pressure, cognitive load, depletion, and induction—including 29,087 participants in total. To our knowledge, this is the la...
We study experimentally how investment decisions are affected by equally stringent but different policy regime treatments and how differences depend on whether decisions are made individually or in groups. In our experiment, subjects decide on an investment level either individually or jointly in groups of three. In addition, decisions are made sub...
In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a
common project (i.e., cooperated) when required to decide quickly than when forced to delay
their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), a pattern consistent with the “social heuristics”
hypothesis proposed by Rand and colleagues. The results of studies using time pres...
This study explores how nudging instruments are used to encourage environmentally friendly behavior within energy consumption, waste management and resource efficiency. The study results provide very interesting examples of nudging resulting in reduced energy consumption in households due to providing real-time information, peer comparison and the...
We develop a model that relates self-control to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas, and we test the model in a laboratory public goods experiment. As predicted, we find a robust association between stronger self-control and higher levels of cooperation, and the association is at its strongest when the decision maker’s risk aversion is low and...
In their 2015 article, Osgood and Muraven showed that cognitive depletion reduces prosocial behaviors but not prosocial attitudes. We expand on the authors’ interpretation by relating their results to recent theorizing on the relationship between prosocial behavior and self-control. This framework distinguishes between the proclivity to identify se...
The social dilemma may involve a within-person conflict, between urges to act selfishly and better judgment to cooperate. Examining the proposition from the perspective of temptation, we pair the public good game with treatments that vary the degree to which money is abstract (numbers on-screen) or tangible (tokens or cash). We also include psychom...
Kieslich and Hilbig (2014) employ a mouse-tracking technique to measure decision conflict in social dilemmas. They report that defectors exhibit more conflict than do cooperators. They infer that cooperation thus is the reflexive, default behavior. We argue, however, that their analysis fails to discriminate between reflexive versus cognitively con...
We show that Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014)—who argue that cooperation is
intuitive—provide an incorrect interpretation of their own data. They make the mistake of
inferring intuition from relative decision times alone, without taking into account absolute
decision times. We re-examine their data and find that the vast majority of their...
We investigate the relationship between social class belonging and contributions to local public goods. By utilizing the social class classifications in Colombia and an experimental design based on the strategy method, we can both study contributions to public goods and classify subjects into contribution types. We find similar contribution levels...
We show that Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014)—who argue that cooperation is intuitive—provide an incorrect interpretation of their own data. They make the mistake of inferring intuition from relative decision times alone, without taking into account absolute decision times. We reexamine their data and find that the vast majority of their r...
The social dilemma may contain, within the individual, a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and better judgment to cooperate. Examining the argument from the perspective of temptation, we pair the public good game with treatments that vary the degree to which money is abstract (merely numbers on-screen) or tangible (tokens or cash...
a b s t r a c t We model self-control conflict as an agent's stochastic struggle against a visceral influence that impels the agent to act sub-optimally. The agent holds costly pre-commitment tech-nology to avoid the conflict altogether and may decide whether to procure pre-commit-ment or to confront the visceral influence. We examine naïve expecta...
a b s t r a c t We model self-control conflict as an agent's stochastic struggle against a visceral influence that impels the agent to act sub-optimally. The agent holds costly pre-commitment tech-nology to avoid the conflict altogether and may decide whether to procure pre-commit-ment or to confront the visceral influence. We examine naïve expecta...
Microfinance institutions are key financial intermediaries between donors and borrowers in developing countries. Loan officers are crucial for establishing and maintaining the relationship between borrowers and microfinance institutions. This paper studies the impact of loan officers on the loan portfolio. We use a survey and choice experiment of 8...
We test in the context of a dictator game the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict be-tween the temptation to act selfishly and the better judgment to act pro-socially. We manipulated the likelihood that individuals would identify self-control conflict, and we measured their trait ability to implement self-control str...
We model self-control conflict as a stochastic struggle of an agent against a visceral influence, which impels the agent to act sub-optimally. The agent holds costly pre-commitment technology to avoid the conflict altogether and may decide whether to procure pre-commitment or to confront the visceral influence. We examine naïve expectations for the...
This paper experimentally investigates the role of beliefs, trust, and risk in shaping cooperative behavior. By applying incentivized elicitation methods to measure these concepts, we find that beliefs about others’ behavior and trust are positively associated with cooperation in a public goods game. However, even though contributing unconditionall...
We test the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict between short-term temptation to be selfish and better judgment to act pro-socially. Using a dictator game and a public goods game, we manipulated the likelihood that individuals identified self-control conflict, and we measured their trait ability to implement self-con...
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When facing the opportunity to allocate resources between oneself and others, individuals may experience a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and preferences to act pro-socially. We explore the domain of conditional cooperation, and we test the hypothesis that increased expectations about others’ average contribution increases own...
In contrast to previous studies on cross-group comparisons of conditional cooperation, this study keeps cross- and within-country dimensions constant. The results reveal significantly different cooperation behavior between social groups in the same location.
Abstract We propose a model,that conceptualizes self-control conflict as a struggle between,an agent and a conflicting visceral influence that impels the agent to act against her better interest. Our model addresses the joint roles of three critical factors in determining goal pursuit in the face of temptation: (1) the value of the goal, (2) the st...