Organizational Behavior Forschung

My current research mainly focuses on gender and diversity-related topics. With colleagues from economics, psychology, and psychiatry, we are trying to better understand which factors lead to differences in female and male careers. We focus on individual-level factors, such as preferences and personality, and structural or contextual factors, such as workplace culture or sexual harassment. A large part of this focuses on women in STEM and academic careers in general. 
I do continue my work on cooperation and workplace stressors, in field studies using survey- and lab-in-the-field methods as well as using laboratory experiments 
I am also interested in methodological questions and innovations. Together with co-authors, we try to increase our understanding of the perceptions that participants in experiments both in Western and non-Western contexts have of the experimental setting, as well as how these perceptions influence their behavior. Recently, we started to explore whether we can leverage LLMs in economic experiments to deepen our understanding of human interaction.

Gender & Diversity

It all started with my PhD research on discrimination in the labor market. Through this I got interested in gender differences, which I studied in different projects, focusing on tournament entry and behavior in economic games. Realizing that gender differences often are only proxies for personality differences, I started to study personality differences and how they affect behavior in economic games. Then, additional diversity categories became part of my research as well. In several second- and third – source funding, we studied age difference in economic decision making. More recently, I turned back to the study of gender differences, in several experimental settings, with a focus on the underlying mechanisms both of differences and of discrimination. Recently I received funding to study factors that keep women from entering and advancing careers in STEM fields. Another main line in that whole area is to move away from attempting to change the women, and instead to scrutinize possible structural changes – and male behavior. This includes the scientific study of the effects of sexual harassment on women´s career choices

Stress & related topics

Stress and decision making:
In the past, I did several experimental studies on the effects of acute and chronic stress on economic decision-making. Recently, I followed up on that using field experiments with an industry partner. I also wrote a chapter on the topic for the forthcoming Edward Elgar Encyclopaedia of Behavioural and Experimental Economics.

Mental Health:
Together with colleagues from psychiatry, we focus on how mental health issues, mostly related to stress (clinical and sub-clinical depression) influence a person´s ability to self-regulate in stressful work conditions (team work, goal setting). We also study patients with borderline disorder and those scoring high on narcissism and psychopathy. In my current Marsilius project, we aim to understand how gender – as opposed to and in interaction with – biological sex affects mental health, and, more precisely, addictive behaviors. 

Cooperation:

In a DFG sponsored project together with Martin Kocher we study cooperativeness and stress in a large international firm – before the pandemic and also during recent home-office.