Daniele Nosenzo

Daniele Nosenzo
University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Economics

PhD

About

64
Publications
12,495
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3,149
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 2010 - present
University of Nottingham
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (64)
Article
Full-text available
Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a ba...
Preprint
Full-text available
Dishonest behaviors such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex-ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as useful interventions to counteract dishonest behavior, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including...
Preprint
Full-text available
Rules are central to social order, but violations can rapidly spread when compliance is costly to individuals. Moreover, the applicability of rules is often ambiguous and open to interpretation, creating “wiggle room" to bend rules in self-serving ways. It is currently unknown how ambiguity shapes rule compliance and the sway of social influence. H...
Article
Full-text available
A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, we provide a compelling empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale...
Article
Full-text available
We study how compliance with norms of pro-social behavior is influenced by peers' compliance in a dynamic and non-strategic experimental setting. We show that social proximity among peers is a crucial determinant of the effect. Without social proximity, norm compliance erodes swiftly because participants only conform to observed norm violations whi...
Article
A popular empirical technique to measure norms uses coordination games to elicit what subjects in an experiment consider appropriate behavior in a given situation (Krupka and Weber in J Eur Econ Assoc 11(3):495–524, 2013). The Krupka–Weber method works under the assumption that subjects use their normative expectations to solve the coordination gam...
Article
Using the Krupka–Weber norm-elicitation technique in a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Kenya, we measure the social norms that regulate the trade-off between wealth accumulation through saving and sharing income with kin and neighbors. We find a plurality of norms: from a strict sharing norm prohibiting any form of wealth accumulation to a nor...
Article
We compare in a laboratory experiment two audit-based tax compliance mechanisms that collect fines from those found non-compliant. The mechanisms differ in the way fines are redistributed to individuals who were either not audited or audited and found to be compliant. The first, as is the case in most extant tax systems, does not discriminate betwe...
Article
We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants’ agreement with the statement “Competition brings the best out of me”, predicts individuals’ willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability, beliefs, and risk attitude (Niederle and Vesterlund,...
Preprint
Full-text available
A popular empirical technique to measure norms uses coordination games to elicit what subjects in an experiment consider appropriate behavior in a given situation (Krupka and Weber, 2013). The Krupka-Weber method works under the assumption that subjects use their normative expectations to solve the coordination game. However, subjects might use alt...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health crisis of the last 100 years. Countries have responded with various levels of lockdown to save lives and stop health systems from being overwhelmed. At the same time, lockdowns entail large socio-economic costs. One exit strategy under consideration is a mobile phone app that traces cl...
Preprint
BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health crisis of the last 100 years. Countries have responded with various levels of lockdown to save lives and stop health systems from being overwhelmed. At the same time, lockdowns entail large socio-economic costs. One exit strategy under consideration is a mobile phone app that traces clo...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health crisis of the last 100 years. Countries have responded with various levels of lockdown to save lives and stop health systems from being overwhelmed. At the same time, lockdowns entail large socio-economic costs. One exit strategy under consideration is a mobile phone app that traces c...
Preprint
Full-text available
We study how an individual's compliance with social norms is inuenced by other actors' norm compliance. In a repeated non-strategic Take-or-Give donation experiment we show that giving is considered socially appropriate while taking is socially inappropriate. Observing norm violations erodes an individual's own norm compliance. We show that the ero...
Article
Full-text available
Can we use the lens of dual-system theories to explain altruistic behavior? In recent years this question has attracted the interest of both economists and psychologists. We contribute to this emerging literature by reporting the results of a meta-study of the literature and a new experiment. Our meta-study is based on 22 experimental studies condu...
Preprint
Full-text available
We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants' agreement with the statement "Competition brings the best out of me", predicts individuals' willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability, beliefs, and risk attitude (Niederle and Vesterlund,...
Article
Previous studies have shown that individuals are less likely to help a person in need when there are “bystanders” present who can also offer help. We designed an experiment to re-examine this “bystander effect” using modified dictator games. We find lower giving rates in the presence of bystanders, confirming the existence of a bystander effect. Ho...
Article
A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms. This paper is the first to provide a clean empirical test of the proposition. Using an incentivized vignette experiment, we directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Results from three samples with around 800 subjects drawn from universit...
Article
Full-text available
We report two studies investigating whether, and if so how, different low-cost interventions affect voter registration rates. Low-cost message-based interventions are increasingly used to promote target behaviours. While growing evidence shows that such ‘nudges’ often significantly impact behaviour, understanding of why interventions work or fail i...
Article
Private information is at the heart of many economic activities. For decades, economists have assumed that individuals are willing to misreport private information if this maximizes their material payoff. We combine data from 90 experimental studies in economics, psychology, and sociology, and show that, in fact, people lie surprisingly little. We...
Article
Full-text available
We experimentally investigate the relationship between discriminatory behaviour and the perceived social inappropriateness of discrimination. We conjecture that discrimination will be weaker when social norms oppose it. Our results support this prediction. Using a Krupka-Weber social norm elicitation task, we find participants perceive it to be mor...
Article
Full-text available
We study the relative effectiveness of contracts that are framed either in terms of bonuses or penalties. In one set of treatments, subjects know at the time of effort provision whether they have achieved the bonus/avoided the penalty. In another set of treatments, subjects only learn the success of their performance at the end of the task. We fail...
Article
We study the effects of voluntary participation on cooperation in collective action problems. Voluntary participation may foster cooperation through a mechanism of assortative selection of interaction partners based on false consensus bias, or through a mechanism whereby the decision to not participate can be used as a threat against free-riders. W...
Article
We study, experimentally, how two alternative incentive mechanisms affect team performance and how a team chooses between alternative mechanisms. We study a group incentive mechanism (team output is shared equally among team members) and a hierarchical mechanism (team output is allocated by a team leader). We find that output is higher when a leade...
Article
Full-text available
A burgeoning literature in economics has started examining the role of social norms in explaining economic behavior. Surprisingly, the vast majority of this literature has studied social norms in asocial decision settings, where individuals are observed to act in isolation from each other. In this paper we use a large-scale dictator game experiment...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate norms of corruption using the norm-elicitation procedure introduced by Krupka and Weber (2013). We use a within-subject design whereby the norms are elicited from the same subjects who are observed making choices in a bribery game. We test whether the order in which the norm-elicitation task and the bribery game are conducted affects...
Article
Firms regularly use incentives to motivate their employees to be more productive. However, often little attention is paid to the language used in employment contracts to describe these incentives. It may be more effective to present incentives as entitlements that can be lost by failing to reach a performance target, rather than as additional rewar...
Article
Full-text available
We experimentally investigate a repeated “inspection game” where, in the stage game, an employee can either work or shirk and an employer simultaneously chooses to inspect or not inspect. The unique equilibrium of the stage game is in mixed strategies with positive probabilities of shirking/inspecting while combined payoffs are maximized when the e...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate social norms for dictator game giving using a recently proposed norm-elicitation procedure (Krupka and Weber, 2013). We elicit norms separately from dictator, recipient, and disinterested third party respondents and find that elicited norms are stable and insensitive to the role of the respondent. The results support the use of this...
Article
We compare in a laboratory experiment two audit-based tax compliance mechanisms that collect fines from those found non-compliant. The mechanisms differ in the way fines are redistributed to individuals who were either not audited or audited and found to be compliant. The first, as is the case in most extant tax systems, does not discriminate betwe...
Article
Laboratory experiments have become a wide-spread tool in economic research. Yet, there is still doubt about how well the results from lab experiments generalize to other settings. In this paper, we investigate the self-selection process of potential subjects into the subject pool. We alter the recruitment email sent to first-year students, either m...
Article
We study the interplay between leading-by-example and group identity in a three-person sequential voluntary contributions game experiment. A common identity between the leader and her two followers is beneficial for cooperation: average contributions are more than 30% higher than in a benchmark treatment where no identity was induced. In two furthe...
Article
In this article we examine the effectiveness of bonuses and fines in an “inspection game,” where costly inspection allows an authority to detect whether or not an individual complies with some standard of behavior. Standard game theoretic analysis predicts that in the inspection game non-compliant behavior is deterred by fines targeted at non-compl...
Article
Pay secrecy is often justified on the ground of concerns about the detrimental consequences of intra‐firm pay comparisons for work morale and performance. Surprisingly, however, there is only limited empirical evidence that the availability of pay comparison information is detrimental for effort provision. In this paper, I study pay comparison effe...
Article
Full-text available
We measure the other-regarding behavior in samples from three related populations in the upper Midwest of the United States: college students, non-student adults from the community surrounding the college, and adult trainee truckers in a residential training program. The use of typical experimental economics recruitment procedures made the first tw...
Article
Full-text available
We study the effect of group size on cooperation in voluntary contribution mechanism games. As in previous experiments, we study four- and eight-person groups in high and low marginal per capita return (MPCR) conditions. We find a positive effect of group size in the low MPCR condition, as in previous experiments. However, in the high MPCR conditio...
Article
Laboratory experiments have become a wide-spread tool in economic research. Yet, there is still doubt about how well the results from lab experiments generalize to other settings. In this paper, we investigate the self-selection process of potential subjects into the subject pool. We alter the recruitment email sent to first-year students, either m...
Article
We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange game experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second agent's effort is influenced by the effort choice of the fi...
Article
Full-text available
Recent work in experimental economics on the effectiveness of rewards and punishments for promoting cooperation mainly examines decentralized incentive systems where all group members can reward and/or punish one another. Many self-organizing groups and societies, however, concentrate the power to reward or punish in the hands of a subset of group...
Article
Full-text available
This paper reports an experiment designed to test whether prior consultation within a group affects subsequent individual decision making in tasks where demonstrability of correct solutions is low. In our experiment subjects considered two paintings created by two different artists and were asked to guess which artist made each painting. We observe...
Article
Full-text available
We use a sequential prisoner's dilemma game to measure the other-regarding behavior in samples from three related populations in the upper Midwest of the United States: 100 college students, 94 non-student adults from the community surrounding the college and 1,069 adult trainee truckers in a residential training program. Both of the first two grou...
Article
We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting. In one parameterization we find that overall provision is lower under sequential than simultaneous contributions, as predicted, but the distribution of contributions is not as extreme as predicted and first movers do no...
Article
We examine the characteristics of effective leaders in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: the individual's cooperativeness and the individual's beliefs about the cooperativeness of others. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are cooperatively inclined. Partly this reflects a false cons...
Article
Full-text available
This study uses a three-person gift-exchange game experiment to examine the impact of pay comparisons on effort behavior. We compare effort choices made in a treatment where coworkers’ wages are secret with effort choices made in two ‘public wages’ treatments. The two ‘public wages’ treatments differ in whether co-workers’ wages are chosen by an em...
Article
Full-text available
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...
Article
Full-text available
We examine the effects of social preferences and beliefs about the social preferences of others in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are reciprocally oriented. Part of the effect can be explained by a false consensus effect: selfish players tend to think it more likely that...
Article
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...
Article
We investigate the effects of pay comparison information (i.e. information about what co-workers earn) and effort comparison information (information about how co-workers perform) in experimental firms composed of one employer and two employees. Exposure to pay comparison information in isolation from effort comparison information does not appear t...
Article
Full-text available
We constructed an agent-based model capable of simulating a simple artificial labour market. Our labour market is stylized similarly to the experimental market Fehr et al. (1993) designed in order to test Akerlof-Yellen's fair wage-effort hypothesis (1982, 1990). According to this approach, involuntary unemployment arises in competitive markets bec...

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