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Alexander Sebald

Alexander Sebald, CES guest in April/May 2014

Personality and conflict in principal-agent relations

What is the role and importance of personality in principal-agent environments based on non-verifiable subjective performance evaluations? How does the agents' inclination to act reciprocally towards the principals, their feeling of entitlement, their ability to form an independent opinion regarding their own performance and the precision of their judgments mitigate the potential conflict inherent in these environments? These are — among others — research questions that Alexander Sebald has lately concentrated on.

More broadly, Alexander Sebald’s fields of interests are behavioral and experimental economics with a particular focus on emotions like reciprocity and guilt aversion. He is very much interested in investigating how these types of emotions can be elicited and measured, how significant they are and what their impact is on contractual relations in work environments in which effort can only be measured subjectively. His research approaches these issues both experimentally as well as theoretically.

During his time in Munich he will mainly focus on a project involving a series of large-scale Internet experiments with a representative sample of the Danish working age population. In these experiments Alexander Sebald and other collaborators investigate (i) how people react to subjective performance feedback; (ii) what determines whether a certain subjective feedback is considered acceptable or not; (iii) whether the fact that performance can only be measured subjectively influences people’s willingness to provide effort and (iv) whether people’s effort choice and reaction to performance feedback depend on `how´ their performance is measured, i.e. the choice of evaluation procedure?

Alexander Sebald holds a joint doctorate from ECARES / Université Libre de Bruxelles and from Maastricht University. He is currently Associate Professor at the Economics Department of the University of Copenhagen.