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Lanz, Bruno
Nom
Lanz, Bruno
Affiliation principale
Fonction
Full Professor
Email
bruno.lanz@unine.ch
Identifiants
Résultat de la recherche
Voici les éléments 1 - 10 sur 10
- PublicationAccès libreSeeing Through the Fog: The Ability to Resolve Ambiguity Reduces Dishonesty(2025)
; ; ; 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 design where participants attempted to resolve an ambiguous task and reported their performance. Results showed that ambiguity and dishonesty increase in unison. Importantly, the participants who resolved ambiguity acted less dishonestly (Study 1). In Studies 2a, 2b, and 3, we increased participants’ ability by briefly training them to disambiguate the information presented in the task. The results showed that participants acted less dishonestly when their ability levels were increased. Overall, the findings indicate that dishonesty can be reduced not only by making tasks less ambiguous but also by enhancing an individual’s ability to successfully resolve ambiguity. - PublicationAccès libreReciprocity and gift exchange in markets for credence goods(2023)
; ; We study the role of reciprocity in markets where expert-sellers have more information about the severity of a problem faced by a consumer. We employ a standard experimental credence goods market to introduce the possibility for consumers to gift the expert-seller before the diagnostic, where the gift is either transferred unconditionally or conditionally on solving the problem. We find that both types of gifts increase the frequency of consumer-friendly actions relative to no gift, but only conditional gifts translate into efficiency gains when the consumer faces a high-severity problem. This suggests that partial alignment of incentives via conditional gifts may outweigh kindness motives when reciprocal actions are not directly observed. Using further treatments with surprise gift exchange, we show that withholding a gift that is expected by expert-sellers significantly reduces the likelihood of consumer-friendly behavior whereas sending a gift to expertsellers who do not expect one has no effect. - PublicationAccès libre
- PublicationAccès librePublic good provision, in-group cooperation and out-group descriptive norms: A lab experiment(2021)
; 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 towards the in-group average. By contrast, negative out-group feedback, which informs participants about below-average cooperation, deters high in-group contributors from decreasing their contribution towards the in-group average. These two effects work together to dampen contribution patterns associated with conditional cooperation. Further, we show that the effects are stronger for individual-level feedback (comparing individual contributions with the out-group average) than for group-level feedback (comparing total contributions by in-group members with that of other groups). Interestingly, when allowed to avoid out-group feedback information, the propensity to consult the feedback is similar for high and low in-group contributors, suggesting that information acquisition is not always self-serving. - PublicationAccès libre
- PublicationAccès libre
- PublicationMétadonnées seulementSocial comparison and energy conservation in a collective action context: A field experiment(2019)
; ; 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 apartments relative to that measured in a control group. For more than 90 percent of participants, financial benefits of energy savings are only indirect, as building-level heating costs are shared across apartments in proportion to their volume. Despite the associated collective action problem, we estimate that the intervention induces a -0.28 C reduction in average indoor temperature. This suggests that direct monetary incentives is not a pre-requisite for social comparison feedback to induce energy savings. - PublicationAccès libreWhen within- and outgroup norms conflict: A public good experiment with strategic ignorance of social norms(2019)
; Social norm 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 introduce social norm feedback in a public good setting and study the interplay between payoff-relevant within-group norms and payoff-irrelevant outgroup norms. We show that conflict between within- and outgroup norms dampens within-group conditional cooperation. Further, participants strategically ignore outgroup norms when these go against self-interest, instead consulting norm information that allows them reducing their contributions. On aggregate, such information acquisition/avoidance strategy favors exposition to norms that hastens the breakdown of cooperation. Finally, norm avoidance is higher when feedback is based on individual rather than group-level comparisons, which is consistent with a self-image cost associated with social norm feedback. - PublicationAccès libre