Serhiy Kandul

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Neuchâtel

Ambiguity acts as a veil that can help conceal and justify dishonest behavior. While an individual’s ability to disambiguate information in a task may help remove the veil of ambiguity and thus promote honesty, the relationship between ambiguity, ability, and dishonesty is currently unexplored. To investigate this, we employed an experimental desig...

One’s willingness to accept an outcome or even to correct it depends on whether the underlying procedure is deemed legitimate. We examine a modified version of the dictator game, where dictatorship is assigned by a fair procedure that is linked to the participant actions but in effect is completely random, to illustrate that this belief is not inde...

We use a public good experiment to study how in-group cooperation is affected by payoff-irrelevant information about cooperation in other groups (i.e., descriptive out-group feedback). We find that positive out-group feedback, indicating above-average cooperation, deters low in-group contributors from increasing their contribution toward the in-gro...

This field experiment quantifies the impact of social norm information on the demand for indoor temperature. Based on high-frequency data from indoor temperature monitors, we provide participating households with a comparison of average temperature in their apartment relative to that measured in a control group. For more than 90 percent of particip...

Social comparison feedback, i.e. informing people about the behavior of others, has been shown to influence prosocial behavior in many domains, including tax compliance and energy conservation. We argue that heterogeneity in people's (un)willingness to consult the corresponding information mitigates the effect of these interventions, and hypothesiz...

In this study we want to find out how people behave in a situation where they can themselves lie or they can share the responsibility for lying with others. To answer this question we study a sender-receiver game followed by a dictator game. It is possible to delegate the act of lying in the sender-receiver game and take pro-social actions in the s...

Avoidance of certain pieces of information, i.e. ignoring the consequences of one’s choices for the wellbeing of others, has been shown to enhance selfishness. We argue that preferences for uncertainty or deliberate ignorance can also be employed by those seeking to behave pro-socially. We use a dictator game with hidden pay-offs for the dictators...

Experimental evidence suggests that past moral actions may positively or negatively influence future moral actions. Cornellissen et al. (2013) find that people’s outcome-based or rule-based mind-set predicts moral path dependencies. We argue that the categorization of the mind-set may also be informative when it comes to explaining the effects that...

People passing by beggars without leaving a penny are not necessarily pure money-maximizers. In the world of sincere and dishonest recipients, some donors might anticipate the disutility they will suffer at the moment they realize their help is misdirected and reduce their willingness to donate to avoid these psychological costs. I employ a dictato...

The absence of a fully-fledged farmland market has been considered as a stumbling block in developing of the agricultural sector in Ukraine. The discussion about the moratorium on farm-land sales in Ukraine seems to come to an end. The new government in many official state-ments declared its commitment to lift the moratorium on farmland trade by 20...

Raw sugar toll processing has been extensively used in international trade. Under tolling, raw sugar is imported duty free, refined and then re-exported as white sugar or in sugar-containing products. This creates a trade that does not harm the essential interests of domestic producers of similar goods. Raw sugar toll refining is especially pertine...