Sergio Alessandro Castagnetti

The University of Warwick · Department of Economics

We investigate whether individuals’ deception rates differ by whether the messages they send to others are about the latter’s relative ability or not. We also study whether they are more likely to deceive when it is in their interest to make others believe that they are either of high ability or low ability. In the experiment, participants play a s...

We investigate whether individuals self-select feedback that allows them to maintain their motivated beliefs. In our lab experiment, subjects can choose the information structure that gives them feedback regarding their rank in the IQ distribution (ego-relevant treatment) or regarding a random number (control). Although beliefs are incentivized, in...

In high pressure situations, individuals may perform well below expectations. This is called “choking under pressure” and we study it in the context of a competitive sports environment. We construct a unique dataset on archery to study whether performance deteriorates at the end of a match, when two players compete in a tiebreak. Our results sugges...

The frustration-aggression hypothesis posits that anger affects economic behaviour essentially by changing temporally the individual preferences. Here, we test a different channel in an experiment where we externally induce anger to a subgroup of subjects (following a standard procedure that we verify by using a novel method of textual analysis). W...