Gergely Hajdu

Telephone:

+43 1 31336 6387

Email:

gergely.hajdu@wu.ac.at

About me:

My main interest is how people make decisions in social contexts, where self- and social-image plays a crucial role. One of my recent papers focuses on motivated beliefs and excuses. In this paper I analyze a situation, where a decision-maker can decide how much money she receives, however, whether this amount is taken from her counterpart is dependent on the ability of a third party. I find suggestive evidence for decision-makers developing self-serving beliefs about the ability of others. In another project, I look at excuses in a different perspective. Two important regularities emerging from empirical work in behavioral economics and psychology are that people are overconfident about their ability and that they like to think of themselves as moral. The experiment tests the hypothesis that overconfidence is in fact a direct consequence of a desire to feel that one is making morally appropriate sharing decisions. In a different laboratory study about product choice with my co-author Balázs Krusper, we investigate the causal effect of choice on beliefs about uncertain product qualities. We anticipate that beliefs are motivated by the desire to feel that one has made a smart decision.This desire might also in uence the updating process and the information acquisition which we plan to test in follow-up experiments. Besides these projects related to motivated cognition I also have a project using administrative data, where my co-author Kinga Marczell, and I analyze how managers attitudes towards their employees change as a result of a health shock.