Apl. Prof. Dr. Holger A. Rau

I am an Adjunct Professor of Experimental Economics at the University of Göttingen. I study laboratory- and field experiments in the areas of Behavioral Economics, Labor Markets, Public Economics, and Behavioral Finance. A special interest is the analysis of the explanatory power of economic preferences to predict market outcomes in organizations and on (financial) markets. In my labor-market agenda, I focus on gender differences in the reactions to institutions and incentives, studying phenomena, such as the gender wage gap. My latest projects involve analyzing laboratory and field experiments that explore the impact of gender differences in preferences on leadership behavior in firms and markets, as well as the role of digitalization. I am also interested in irrational investor behavior, such as the disposition effect. At the moment, I hold the position of Principal Investigator for a large interdisciplinary DFG project on "Gender Effects in Oligopolistic Markets: Leadership and Collusion."

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Research interests

Behavioral Economics, Labor and Organizational Economics, Public Economics, Behavioral Finance


Latest R&Rs & Selected Publications

(I currently have 30 peer-reviewed publications. A complete list is available here )

Latest R&Rs:

Gender and Cooperation in the Presence of Negative Externalities (with Justus Haucap, and Christina Heldman), R&R in Games and Economic Behavior

Delayed Risk in Individual and Social Decisions (with Stefan Trautmann, and Asri Özgümüs), R&R in Journal of Economic Psychology

Latest Publications:

The Effects of Betrayal Aversion on Effort Provision when Incentives are Fragile (with Volker Benndorf, and Stephan Müller), Forthcoming in Management Science

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of 45 crowd-sourced experimental designs [with Christoph Huber, Anna Dreber, Felix Holzmeister, and many more], Forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120 (23) e2215572120, 2023

Selected List of Publications:

The Team Allocator Game: Allocation Power in Public Good Games (with A. Karakostas, M. Kocher, D. Matzat, G. Riewe, Games and Economic Behavior 140, 73-87, 2023.

Economic Preferences and Compliance in the Social Stress Test of the COVID-19 Crisis (with Stephan Müller), Journal of Public Economics 194, 104322, 2021.

Decisions under Uncertainty in Social Contexts (with Stephan Müller), Games and Economic Behavior 116, 73-95, 2019.

On the Impact of Quotas and Decision Rules in Collective Bargaining (with Robert Feicht, Veronika Grimm and Gesine Stephan), European Economic Review 100, 175-192, 2017.

How Competitiveness May Cause a Gender Wage Gap: Experimental Evidence (with Matthias Heinz and Hans-Theo Normann), European Economic Review 90, 336-349, 2016.

The Relation of Risk Attitudes and Other-Regarding Preferences: A Within-Subjects Analysis. (with Stephan Müller), European Economic Review 85, 1-7 (lead article), 2016.

The Disposition Effect in Team Investment Decisions: Experimental Evidence. Journal of Banking and Finance 61, 272-282, 2015.