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Professor Dr Sabrina Jeworrek

Professor Dr Sabrina Jeworrek
Current Position

since 7/17

Head of the Research Group Organisational Behaviour and Corporate Success

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

since 10/16

Assistant Professor of Applied Microeconometrics

Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg

since 10/16

Member of the Department Structural Change and Productivity

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

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Research Interests
  • behavioural and experimental economics
  • empirical personnel and labour market economics
  • non-monetary incentive systems and employee motivation

Sabrina Jeworrek is a member of the Department Structural Change and Productivity at IWH as well as Assistant Professor of Applied Microeconometrics at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg since October 2016. She also holds the position of EconBiz advisory board member since 2017. Her research focuses on behavioural economics and employee motivation.

Sabrina Jeworrek obtained her bachelor's and master's degree from University of Marburg and a PhD from Trier University at IAAEU (Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union).

Your contact

Professor Dr Sabrina Jeworrek
Professor Dr Sabrina Jeworrek
Mitglied - Department Structural Change and Productivity
Send Message +49 345 7753-730 Personal page

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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The Effect of Community Managers on Online Idea Crowdsourcing Activities

Lars Hornuf Sabrina Jeworrek

in: Journal of the Association for Information Systems, No. 1, 2022

Abstract

In this study, we investigate whether and to what extent community managers in online collaborative communities can stimulate community activities through their engagement. Using a novel data set of 22 large online idea crowdsourcing campaigns, we find that moderate but steady manager activities are adequate to enhance community participation. Moreover, we show that appreciation, motivation, and intellectual stimulation by community managers are positively associated with community participation but that the effectiveness of these communication strategies depends on the form of participation managers wish to encourage. Finally, the data reveal that community manager activities requiring more effort, such as media file uploads vs. simple written comments, have a stronger effect on community participation.

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Mission, Motivation, and the Active Decision to Work for a Social Cause

Sabrina Jeworrek Vanessa Mertins

in: Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, No. 2, 2022

Abstract

The mission of a job affects the type of worker attracted to an organization but may also provide incentives to an existing workforce. We conducted a natural field experiment with 246 short-term workers. We randomly allocated some of these workers to either a prosocial or a commercial job. Our data suggest that the mission of a job has a performance-enhancing motivational impact on particular individuals only, those with a prosocial attitude. However, the mission is very important if it has been actively selected. Those workers who have chosen to contribute to a social cause outperform the ones randomly assigned to the same job by about half a standard deviation. This effect seems to be a universal phenomenon that is not driven by information about the alternative job, the choice itself, or a particular subgroup.

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Working Papers

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Where to Go? High-skilled Individuals’ Regional Preferences

Sabrina Jeworrek Matthias Brachert

in: IWH Discussion Papers, No. 27, 2022

Abstract

We conduct a discrete choice experiment to investigate how the location of a firm in a rural or urban region affects job attractiveness and contributes to the spatial sorting of university students and graduates. We characterize the attractiveness of a location based on several dimensions (social life, public infrastructure, connectivity) and combine this information with an urban or rural attribution. We also vary job design as well as contractual characteristics of the job. We find that job offers from companies in rural areas are generally considered less attractive. This is true regardless of the attractiveness of the region. The negative perception is particularly pronounced among persons with urban origin and singles. These persons rate job offers from rural regions significantly worse. In contrast, high-skilled individuals who originate from rural areas as well as individuals with partners and kids have no specific preference for jobs in urban or rural areas.

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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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Keywords

Labour Market Productivity Behaviour
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