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Do emotional carryover effects carry over? (2024)
Journal Article
Masters, N., Lloyd, T., & Starmer, C. (2025). Do emotional carryover effects carry over?. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 114, Article 102312. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2024.102312

Existing research has demonstrated carryover effects whereby emotions generated in one context influence decisions in other, unrelated ones. We examine the carryover effect in relation to valuations of risky and ambiguous lotteries with a novel focus... Read More about Do emotional carryover effects carry over?.

The prototypical UK blood donor, homophily and blood donation: Blood donors are like you, not me (2024)
Journal Article
Ferguson, E., Bowen, S., Mills, R., Reynolds, C., Davison, K., Lawrence, C., Maharaj, R., Starmer, C., Barr, A., Williams, T., Croucher, M., & Brailsford, S. R. (in press). The prototypical UK blood donor, homophily and blood donation: Blood donors are like you, not me. Vox Sanguinis, https://doi.org/10.1111/vox.13731

Background and Objectives
Homophily represents the extent to which people feel others are like them and encourages the uptake of activities they feel people like them do. Currently, there are no data on blood donor homophily with respect to (i) peop... Read More about The prototypical UK blood donor, homophily and blood donation: Blood donors are like you, not me.

Introducing IOS11 as an extended interactive version of the ‘Inclusion of Other in the Self’ scale to estimate relationship closeness (2024)
Journal Article
Baader, M., Starmer, C., Tufano, F., & Gächter, S. (2024). Introducing IOS11 as an extended interactive version of the ‘Inclusion of Other in the Self’ scale to estimate relationship closeness. Scientific Reports, 14(1), Article 8901. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-58042-6

The study of relationship closeness has a long history in psychology and is currently expanding across the social sciences, including economics. Estimating relationship closeness requires appropriate tools. Here, we introduce and test a tool for esti... Read More about Introducing IOS11 as an extended interactive version of the ‘Inclusion of Other in the Self’ scale to estimate relationship closeness.

Measuring “Group Cohesion” to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production (2023)
Journal Article
Gächter, S., Starmer, C., & Tufano, F. (2023). Measuring “Group Cohesion” to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production. Review of Economics and Statistics, 1-45. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01283

We introduce "group cohesion" to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the "oneness scale" from psychology. A series of experiments, including a pre-register... Read More about Measuring “Group Cohesion” to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production.

Communicating the move to individualized donor selection policy: Framing messages focused on recipients and safety (2022)
Journal Article
Ferguson, E., Bowen, S., Lawrence, C., Starmer, C., Barr, A., Davison, K., Reynolds, C., & Brailsford, S. R. (2023). Communicating the move to individualized donor selection policy: Framing messages focused on recipients and safety. Transfusion, 63(1), 171-181. https://doi.org/10.1111/trf.17175

Background: Men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) have been deferred from donating blood. However, recent evidence supports the adoption of donor screening based on individuals' sexual behavior over population-based criteria. We explore how best to frame c... Read More about Communicating the move to individualized donor selection policy: Framing messages focused on recipients and safety.

An inquiry into the nature and causes of the Description - Experience gap (2022)
Journal Article
Cubitt, R., Kopsacheilis, O., & Starmer, C. (2022). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the Description - Experience gap. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 65(2), 105-137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-022-09393-w

The Description-Experience gap (DE gap) is widely thought of as a tendency for people to act as if overweighting rare events when information about those events is derived from descriptions but as if underweighting rare events when they experience th... Read More about An inquiry into the nature and causes of the Description - Experience gap.

Social closeness can help, harm and be irrelevant in solving pure coordination problems (2022)
Journal Article
Gächter, S., Starmer, C., Thöni, C., Tufano, F., & Weber, T. O. (2022). Social closeness can help, harm and be irrelevant in solving pure coordination problems. Economics Letters, 216, Article 110552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110552

Experimental research has shown that ordinary people often perform remarkably well in solving coordination games that involve no conflicts of interest. While most experiments in the past studied such coordination games among socially distant anonymou... Read More about Social closeness can help, harm and be irrelevant in solving pure coordination problems.

Confidence snowballing and relative performance feedback (2021)
Journal Article
Murad, Z., & Starmer, C. (2021). Confidence snowballing and relative performance feedback. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 190, 550-572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.08.006

We investigate whether uninformative relative performance feedback can create biases in confidence leading it to 'snowball'. We study elicited confidence about own performance, relative to other group members, in three stages. As subjects move across... Read More about Confidence snowballing and relative performance feedback.

Contextualised strong reciprocity explains selfless cooperation despite selfish intuitions and weak social heuristics (2021)
Journal Article
Isler, O., Gächter, S., Maule, A. J., & Starmer, C. (2021). Contextualised strong reciprocity explains selfless cooperation despite selfish intuitions and weak social heuristics. Scientific Reports, 11(1), Article 13868. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-93412-4

Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues tha... Read More about Contextualised strong reciprocity explains selfless cooperation despite selfish intuitions and weak social heuristics.

People prefer coordinated punishment in cooperative interactions (2019)
Journal Article
Molleman, L., Kölle, F., Starmer, C., & Gächter, S. (2019). People prefer coordinated punishment in cooperative interactions. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 1145–1153. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0707-2

Human groups can often maintain high levels of cooperation despite the threat of exploitation by individuals who reap the benefits of cooperation without contributing to its costs1,2,3,4. Prominent theoretical models suggest that cooperation is parti... Read More about People prefer coordinated punishment in cooperative interactions.

Reexamining How Utility and Weighting Functions Get Their Shapes: A Quasi-Adversarial Collaboration Providing a New Interpretation (2019)
Journal Article
Alempaki, D., Canic, E., Mullett, T., Skylark, W., Starmer, C., Stewart, N., & Tufano, F. (2019). Reexamining How Utility and Weighting Functions Get Their Shapes: A Quasi-Adversarial Collaboration Providing a New Interpretation. Management Science, 65(10), 4451-4949. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3170

Stewart, Reimers and Harris (2015, SRH hereafter) demonstrated that shapes of utility and probability weighting functions could be manipulated by adjusting the distributions of outcomes and probabilities on offer, as predicted by the theory of Decisi... Read More about Reexamining How Utility and Weighting Functions Get Their Shapes: A Quasi-Adversarial Collaboration Providing a New Interpretation.

Promoting voter registration: the effects of low-cost interventions on behaviour and norms (2019)
Journal Article
Kölle, F., Lane, T., Nosenzo, D., & Starmer, C. (2020). Promoting voter registration: the effects of low-cost interventions on behaviour and norms. Behavioural Public Policy, 4(1), 26-49. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2019.10

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 s... Read More about Promoting voter registration: the effects of low-cost interventions on behaviour and norms.

On the priming of risk preferences: the role of fear and general affect (2019)
Journal Article
Alempaki, D., Starmer, C., & Tufano, F. (2019). On the priming of risk preferences: the role of fear and general affect. Journal of Economic Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2018.12.011

Priming is an established tool in psychology for investigating aspects of cognitive processes underlying decision making and is increasingly applied in economics. We report a systematic attempt to test the reproducibility and generalisability of prim... Read More about On the priming of risk preferences: the role of fear and general affect.

Is intuition really cooperative? Improved tests support the social heuristics hypothesis (2018)
Journal Article
Isler, O., Maule, J., & Starmer, C. (in press). Is intuition really cooperative? Improved tests support the social heuristics hypothesis. PLoS ONE, 13(1), Article e0190560. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190560

Understanding human cooperation is a major scientific challenge. While cooperation is typically explained with reference to individual preferences, a recent cognitive process view hypothesized that cooperation is regulated by socially acquired heuris... Read More about Is intuition really cooperative? Improved tests support the social heuristics hypothesis.

Consumption experience, choice experience and the endowment effect (2017)
Journal Article
Humphrey, S. J., Lindsay, L., & Starmer, C. (in press). Consumption experience, choice experience and the endowment effect. Journal- Economic Science Association, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-017-0044-z

We report experiments investigating how experience influences the endowment effect. Our experiments feature endowments which are bundles of unfamiliar consumption goods. We examine how a subject’s willingness to swap items from their endowment is inf... Read More about Consumption experience, choice experience and the endowment effect.

How do risk attitudes affect measured confidence? (2016)
Journal Article
Murad, Z., Sefton, M., & Starmer, C. (2016). How do risk attitudes affect measured confidence?. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 52(1), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-016-9231-1

We examine the relationship between confidence in own absolute performance and risk attitudes using two confidence elicitation procedures: self-reported (non-incentivised) confidence and an incentivised procedure that elicits the certainty equivalent... Read More about How do risk attitudes affect measured confidence?.

Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale (2015)
Journal Article
Gaechter, S., Starmer, C., & Tufano, F. (2015). Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale. PLoS ONE, 10(6), Article e0129478. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0129478

Understanding the nature and influence of social relationships is of increasing interest to behavioral economists, and behavioral scientists more generally. In turn, this creates a need for tractable, and reliable, tools for measuring fundamental asp... Read More about Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale.

On preference imprecision (2015)
Journal Article
Cubitt, R. P., Navarro-Martinez, D., & Starmer, C. (2015). On preference imprecision. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 50(1), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-015-9207-6

Recent research invokes preference imprecision to explain violations of individual decision theory. While these inquiries are suggestive, the nature and significance of such imprecision remain poorly understood. We explore three questions using a new... Read More about On preference imprecision.

Does consultation improve decision-making? (2014)
Journal Article
Isopi, A., Nosenzo, D., & Starmer, C. (2014). Does consultation improve decision-making?. Theory and Decision, 77(3), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-014-9449-9

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... Read More about Does consultation improve decision-making?.