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Dr Joschka Waibel

Dr Joschka Waibel
Current Position

since 6/22

Junior Research Affiliate

Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) – Member of the Leibniz Association

Research Interests
  • behavioural economics

Joschka Waibel joined the institute as a Junior Research Affiliate in June 2022. His research focuses on behavioural economics.

Joschka Waibel received his bachelor's degree from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, his master's degree from Leipzig University, and his PhD from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.

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Dr Joschka Waibel
Dr Joschka Waibel
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Publications

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Competition and Moral Behavior: A Meta-Analysis of Forty-Five Crowd-Sourced Experimental Designs

Anna Dreber Felix Holzmeister Sabrina Jeworrek Magnus Johannesson Joschka Waibel Utz Weitzel et al.

in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), No. 23, 2023

Abstract

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.

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Unethical Employee Behavior Against Coworkers Following Unkind Management Treatment: An Experimental Analysis

Sabrina Jeworrek Joschka Waibel

in: Managerial and Decision Economics, No. 5, 2021

Abstract

We study unethical behavior toward unrelated coworkers as a response to managerial unkindness with two experiments. In our lab experiment, we do not find that subjects who experienced unkindness are more likely to cheat in a subsequent competition against another coworker who simultaneously experienced mistreatment. A subsequent survey experiment suggests that behavior in the lab can be explained by individuals' preferences for norm adherence, because unkind management behavior does not alter the perceived moral appropriateness of cheating. However, having no shared experience of managerial unkindness opens up some moral wiggle room for employees to misbehave at the costs of others.

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Working Papers

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Alone at Home: The Impact of Social Distancing on Norm-consistent Behavior

Sabrina Jeworrek Joschka Waibel

in: IWH Discussion Papers, No. 8, 2021

Abstract

Around the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has turned daily live upside down since social distancing is probably the most effective means of containing the virus until herd immunity is reached. Social norms have been shown to be an important determinant of social distancing behaviors. By conducting two experiments and using the priming method to manipulate social isolation recollections, we study whether social distancing has in turn affected norms of prosociality and norm compliance. The normative expectations of what behaviors others would approve or disapprove in our experimental setting did not change. Looking at actual behavior, however, we find that persistent social distancing indeed caused a decline in prosociality – even after the relaxation of social distancing rules and in times of optimism. At the same time, our results contain some good news since subjects seem still to care for norms and become more prosocial once again after we draw their attention to the empirical norm of how others have previously behaved in a similar situation.

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