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., …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.