I am a PhD student in Economics at the University of Cambridge and a Cusanuswerk, Cambridge Trust, and Kurt Hahn Trust scholar.
I am passionate about Behavioral Political Economy and Experimental Economics. Specifically, I am interested in the effect of (political) information and institutional environments on how individuals perceive, trust, and cooperate with each other.
Before starting my PhD, I worked as Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Hub for Equal Representation at the LSE. I received my MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics and completed my BSc in Economics at the University of Mannheim.
Work in Progress
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Electoral competition increases animosity between partisan voters
Partisan animosity in the U.S. is widely perceived as a threat to democratic stability. Longitudinal evidence of partisan animosity relies on survey-based metrics that capture stated attitudes towards parties, rather than actual behavior towards individuals, and show a puzzling recent plateau. We investigate how electoral competition affects stated and behavioral partisan animosity during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election by comparing battleground and safe states. Across three waves of online experiments around the election, we compare behavioral animosity towards other individuals in trust and cooperation games with stated measures targeting individuals, groups, and parties. Partisan animosity increases only in battleground states and only for measures targeting individuals. The effect diminishes as the social target of animosity becomes a more collective entity: it is strongest toward individuals, weaker toward groups, and negligible toward parties. Our results reveal a democratic trade-off between electoral competition and animosity among voters that standard measures of partisan animosity fail to capture.
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Choosing Accountability: Experimental Evidence on Information Control and Cooperation in a Public Good Game
Asymmetric power over resource allocation and information is common in various environments. We study how unilateral control over information shapes cooperation when one actor can appropriate common resources. We experimentally vary the transparency of actions in a repeated public good game in which one group member — the Leader — can embezzle from others' contributions. In a between subject design we determine if participants' actions are transparent, opaque, or if the Leader can manipulate the information. In a final treatment, we allow the Leader to endogenously choose among these informational regimes. When the flow of information is determined exogenously, contributions are highest when the Leader can manipulate information even though others know that these messages may be misleading. Contributions are lowest when all actions are fully transparent. The pattern reverses when informational regimes are endogenous to the Leader's selection. Groups achieve the highest welfare when the Leader voluntarily commits to full transparency. Our results show that transparency fosters cooperation only when it is self-imposed rather than enforced, providing experimental evidence for the behavioral foundations of voluntary accountability and informational control in organizations and politics.
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Polarization by Moralization
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Experimental Evidence on Resisting Policy Advice