Events

We investigate how social identity and social distance affect animosity towards out-group members, and the extent to which social desirability bias (SDB) distorts expressed preferences. A theoretical model predicts an inverted U-shaped relationship between social distance and out-group animosity, as well as the conditions for a negative relationship between social distance and SDB. We find that for far enough social distance, both animosity and SDB decline. To test these predictions, we conduct an online experiment in the United States implementing direct survey questions as well as a list experiment. We evaluate respondents’ willingness to accept an out-group member with less social distance (a Republican or a Democrat) versus with far social distance (a Chinese Communist Party sympathizer) as a neighbor or as a colleague. We find substantial true animosity toward domestic political opponents (45.6%), whereas true animosity toward CCP sympathizers is significantly lower (35.9%). Respondents exhibit strong positive SDB toward domestic opponents (16.1%), overreporting their animosity in direct settings. In contrast, SDB drops significantly regarding CCP sympathizers (6.8%). These findings closely align with our theoretical predictions, confirming that far social distance attenuates both out-group animosity and social image concerns. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that Democrats display significantly higher domestic animosity (59.7% true, 80.5% stated) and SDB (20.8%) than Republicans (31.5% true, 43.0% stated; 11.5% SDB). Furthermore, residing in politically competitive swing states markedly reduces expressed animosity and alters SDB.
This study contributes to the literature of identity economics and political polarization by providing a unified framework that disentangles genuine identity-driven hostility from social image concerns. It also shows that domestic partisan-divides generate far greater behavioral friction and social pressure than distant geopolitical rivalries, at least in the USA. 
 ---
Subhasish Modak Chowdhury is a Professor at the University of Sheffield where he serves as the Director of the BRAINS research centre, and lead the Behavioural Economics Research Group. He is a microeconomist with research interests in contest theory, behavioral economics, industrial organization etc. Recently he joined the Journal of Competition Law & Economics as an Associate Editor.

Sign up for a 1-to-1 meeting with Subhasish: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/mxtq
Sign up for the social dinner: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/ylmw

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought over 400,000 refugees to the Czech Republic within months. We ask whether this shock affected the mental health of the receiving population, using Czech GP prescription records. Because Czech registries do not link patients to providers, we simulate GP catchment areas from a congestion-sensitive choice model and build a physician-level exposure measure. Exposure raised antidepressant prescribing on the extensive margin — more patients treated, no rise in dose per patient — while anxiolytic prescribing and overall prescribing volume did not respond. The response is concentrated in the first months after the inflow began and leaves no persistent trace.

Healthcare organizations increasingly invest in innovative technologies to improve quality, outcomes, and efficiency. Yet, the successful adoption of complex innovations depends not only on their technical performance but also on how they are integrated into organizational processes. Robot-Assisted Surgery provides an important example of this challenge, as implementation success is strongly influenced by organizational factors. This research examines how healthcare professionals’ involvement in technology evaluation influences the effective implementation of innovations. Building on organizational theory, Health Technology Assessment, and the implementation climate literature developed by Klein and Sorra in 1996 and Helfrich et al in 2007, the study argues that participation in assessment and decision-making fosters acceptance, legitimacy, and alignment between clinical and managerial priorities. Innovation adoption is therefore conceptualized as an organizational process in which professional involvement acts as a key governance mechanism.

The empirical setting is the IRCCS Sant’Orsola University Hospital of Bologna, where, in 2026, a participatory evaluation process was implemented to assess three robotic surgical platforms. Surgeons, anaesthesiologists, and operating room nurses were the protagonists in defining the evaluation criteria and designing the comparative testing protocols, which were implemented through both simulation-based exercises and clinical activities. The project led to the development of profession-specific questionnaires for the different stakeholder groups, resulting in the collection of 357 evaluations and the treatment of 39 patients over a 42-days period. The expected outcome is a healthcare-specific framework explaining how stakeholder involvement contributes to implementation effectiveness. The research highlights factors such as multidisciplinary coordination, shared responsibility, feedback integration, and alignment between managerial and clinical priorities, arguing that the value of innovation depends not only on technology itself but also on the organizational processes through which it is adopted and integrated into practice.

Tommaso Roccabianca is a PhD Candidate in Public Governance, Management and Policy at the Department of Management, University of Bologna, and a collaborator at IRCCS Sant'Orsola University Hospital since 2024. His research focuses on the adoption and implementation of technological innovations in healthcare organizations, with particular attention to robotic surgery, operating room management, and the organizational changes associated with the introduction of new technologies.

Sign up for a 1-to-1 meeting with Tommaso: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/mhlp

Base-rate neglect—the failure of posterior beliefs to fully incorporate prior probabilities—is one of the most robust deviations from Bayesian updating. We argue that the literature has largely conflated two distinct psychological mechanisms that can generate this pattern. The first is the fallacy of the uniform prior (FUP), whereby individuals update as if the prior were uniform. The second is the fallacy of the transposed conditional (FTC), whereby individuals treat the precision of a signal as if it were the posterior probability. While both mechanisms imply base-rate neglect, they map information into beliefs in fundamentally different ways. We show that they are observationally equivalent under symmetric information structures, which dominate existing designs, but diverge under asymmetry. We develop a framework that nests both mechanisms and an experimental design that identifies them empirically.

Ro'i Zultan is a professor at the Department of Economics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the director of the Negev Experimental Economics Laboratory. He is an experimental economist with a background in cognitive and experimental psychology. His research focuses on understanding how group dynamics influence cognition and behavior, as well as on broader questions of cooperation, coordination, and decision-making in teams. He is also interested in game theory, market efficiency, ethics, and the methodological foundations of experimental research.

Sign up for a 1-to-1 meeting with Ro'i: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/ailg
Sign up for the social dinner: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/feck

Hande Erkut is a postdoctoral researcher in the Market Behavior research unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She is interested in ethics and how it influences and is influenced by decision making across different areas of life, such as social, economic, and health. Her research uses tools from behavioral and experimental economics.

Deborah Nováková is the Head of the Academic Skills Center at CERGE-EI, where she has been teaching since August 2012. She has gained professional experience at the University of Birmingham, Maastricht University, and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, Canada. Her presentation will focus on the core skills needed for effective academic writing and presentations in today’s academic environment, highlighting common mistakes and offering practical guidance, particularly relevant for Ph.D. students and junior faculty members.

Sili Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). She received her PhD from the University of Zurich in 2022.
Sili is a behavioral economist interested in understanding what shapes the way we see the world and its implications. Specifically, her research focuses on the role of (i) perceptions, (ii) narratives, and (iii) values in individual beliefs and economic behaviors.

Women remain persistently underrepresented in political decision‑making across the European Union, particularly in gender‑unequal countries such as post-communist Central Europe. This paper examines whether targeted digital voter mobilization can help reduce the political gender gap in a proportional representation system with (semi-)open party lists. I study “Vote for a Woman” – a bottom‑up, non‑partisan, citizen-run social media campaign in Czechia that encouraged voters to cast preferential votes for women candidates on semi-open party lists in the 2021 and 2025 Czech parliamentary elections. I employ two different types of event studies and dynamic difference‑in‑differences strategies to estimate its causal impact on voter behavior with respect to women politicians. The results show that the campaign increased the share of preferential votes cast for women candidates by 16% in the first campaign rollout in 2021 and by 30% in the second rollout in 2025. It also increased the probability of a woman to be elected by 18-27%, with an increasing effect size over time. The results in both election years are driven by voters of two specific political parties. These findings provide the first causal evidence that a citizen‑driven social media initiative can meaningfully strengthen electoral support for women, even in contexts with long‑standing gender inequalities.

Nick Deschacht is Associate Professor of labour economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business of KU Leuven. His research is focused on applied micro-econometrics and the political economy of labour markets. He teaches courses on labour economics, econometrics, and policy evaluation methods.

Jean-Robert Tyran is a Professor of Economics at the University of Vienna and director of the Vienna Center for Experimental Economics (VCEE). His research interests are broad, spanning topics in Political Economy and Public Economics. More generally, he explores how institutions -- such as markets and democracy -- are shaped by bounded rationality and social preferences. According to IDEAS/RePEc, his work primarily falls within the following fields: Experimental Economics, Cognitive and Behavioral Economics, Collective Decision-Making, Positive Political Economics, Social Norms and Social Capital, Public Economics.