Mitigating manipulation in committees: Just let them talk!
[Working Paper]
[Preregistration]
Many decisions rest on the collective judgment of small groups like committees, boards, or teams.
However, some group members may have hidden agendas and manipulate this judgment to sway decisions
in their favor. Utilizing an incentivized experiment, I compare how the
Delphi technique and face-to-face interaction are affected by manipulation.
Without manipulation, Delphi is more accurate than face-to-face interaction. This reverses with
manipulation. Perceived trustworthiness only matches objective accuracy in situations with hidden
agendas, where face-to-face interaction produces simultaneously more accurate and trusted judgments.
With manipulation sharing of (truthful) information decreases in Delphi but not in face-to-face
interaction.
Debt Aversion: Theory and Measurement
[Working Paper]
Debt aversion can have severe adverse effects on financial decision-making. We propose a model of debt aversion, and design an experiment involving real debt and saving contracts, to elicit and jointly estimate debt aversion with preferences over time, risk and losses. Structural estimations reveal that the vast majority of participants (89%) are debt averse, and that this has a strong impact on choice. We estimate the "borrowing premium" -- the compensation a debt averse person would require to accept getting into debt -- to be around 16% of the principal for our average participant.
The debt aversion survey module: An experimentally validated tool to measure individual debt
aversion
[Working Paper]
We develop an experimentally validated, short and easy-to-use survey module for measuring individual debt aversion. To this end, we first estimate debt aversion on an individual level, using choice data from Meissner and Albrecht (2022). This data also contains responses to a large set of debt aversion survey items, consisting of existing items from the literature and novel items developed for this study. Out of these, we identify a survey module comprising two qualitative survey items to best predict debt aversion in the incentivized experiment.
Debt aversion among German households
We measure individual debt aversion among participants of the 2020 representative innovation sample of the German socio-economic panel (SOEP). Exploiting the panel nature of the data we investigate on the relation of individual debt attitudes and real-world indebtedness as well as other debt-related behaviors such as homeownership.