Publikationen

Digital game-based learning (GBL) is attracting attention in economics education, as this type of learning allows abstract content to be simulated through play. However, a systematic review of its effects is still lacking. This paper synthesizes the empirical evidence by addressing the following two questions: (1) What are the effects of GBL in economics education compared to those of other media? (2) Which features of GBL are important for learning? Intervention studies (k = 20, 2011-2021) that focus on upper secondary and higher education are analyzed. The findings identify advantages of GBL concerning subject knowledge. However, the findings related to fostering motivation are inconsistent. Moreover, students’ performance expectations are found to promote learning engagement. Thus, GBL is suitable if the target group can recognize the content-related benefit, and if the content is designed to be challenging.

In many countries, the current vaccination rates are stagnating, to the extent that vaccine hesitancy—the delay or refusal to take recommended vaccinations—forms a major obstacle to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. This tendency is particularly concerning when observed among healthcare workers who are opinion leaders on medical matters for their patients and peers. Our study surveys 965 employees of two large Swiss hospitals and profiles vaccine-hesitant hospital employees using not only socio-demographic characteristics, but also a comprehensive set of standard behavioral preference measures: (i) Big-5 personality traits, (ii) risk-, time- and social preferences, and (iii) perceived prevailing social norms. Using multinomial probit models and linear probability models, we find that vaccine-hesitant hospital employees are less patient and less likely to perceive vaccination as the prevailing social norm—in addition to replicating previously published socio-demographic results. Our findings are robust to a range of model specifications, as well as individual and situational covariates. Our study thus offers actionable policy implications for tailoring public-health communications to vaccine-hesitant hospital employees.

Many intertemporal trade-offs are unbalanced: while the advantages of options are concentrated in a few periods, the disadvantages are dispersed over numerous periods. We provide novel experimental evidence for “concentration bias,” the tendency to overweight advantages that are concentrated in time. Subjects commit to too much overtime work that is dispersed over multiple days in exchange for a bonus that is concentrated in time: concentration bias increases subjects’ willingness to work by 22.4% beyond what standard discounting models could account for. In additional conditions and a complementary experiment involving monetary payments, we study the mechanisms behind concentration bias and demonstrate the robustness of our findings.

Belief elicitation is important in many different fields of economic research. We show that how a researcher elicits such beliefs – in particular, whether the belief is about the participant’s opponent, an unrelated other, or the population of others – strongly affects the belief reports. We study the underlying processes and find a clear consensus effect. Yet, when matching the opponent’s action would lead to a low payoff and the researcher asks for the belief about this opponent, ex-post rationalization kicks in and beliefs are re-adjusted again. Hence, we recommend to ask about unrelated others or about the population in such cases, as ‘opponent beliefs’ are even more detached from the beliefs participants had when deciding about their actions in the corresponding game. We find no evidence of wishful thinking in any of the treatments.

The research aims to provide a review of the brain gain and brain drain phenomena in the emerging market context. Specifically, we investigate the push and pull factors of talent migration focusing at society-, firm-, industry- and location-specific determinants, and develop a theoretical framework that establishes the relationships between different types of factors and global talent management. The paper extends the understanding of the role of global talent management and global talent mobility in non-Western contexts. Through a series of propositions, we claim that global talent management, as a system of practices aimed at attracting, developing and retaining talented workers on a global scale, may serve as a mediator in transforming outward talent migration into inward talent migration, thus stimulating future empirical research on the topic.

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dc.contributor.author: Dufourt, Frédéric; Kerdelhué, Lisa