AG Heinzelmann, 16 Jan 2026 Topic TBA

Behavioural interventions have been employed widely to improve public policies, primarily in the form of "nudges". However, recent research finds that nudges have small to modest effects leading to calls to focus on systemic change and to foster capable and engaged citizens. Robust public debate is likely to facilitate the adoption of rules that lead to large and sustainable societal transformations. Yet, little is known about which types of moral reasoning are persuasive and who is persuaded by which elements of those arguments. First, we adopt the typology of deontological and consequentialist arguments to create a tractable formal framework that maps types of arguments to behavioural predictions. We allow for heterogeneous effects by moral type and prior beliefs. Our approach permits us to distinguish between categories within consequentialist arguments, namely, those that focus on changing probabilities attached to outcomes, versus those that focus on changing the set of outcomes that one could have in mind. Then, we develop an incentivised experimental design, taking advantage of developments in machine learning and AI, to classify respondents into types and to empirically test the predictions of our model.

Moumita Deb is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Alfred Weber Institute for Economics, University of Heidelberg. Her work centers on behavioural and experimental economics, with a particular focus on information acquisition, committee and voting dynamics, and the public economics of collective decision-making. Recent working papers include “The Swing Voter’s Curse Revisited: Transparency’s Impact on Committee Voting” (2024), as well as studies on information acquisition in threshold public goods games and the impact of social media on traditional news consumption.

Moumita Deb

Theo Alysandratos is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at Heidelberg University, specializing in experimental economics. His research explores the interplay between information, groups, and institutions, including experiments on group vs. individual judicial decision-making, the market dynamics of reputation in credence goods, norms, corruption, and learning. His notable publications include “Rice Farming and the Origins of Cooperative Behavior” (Economic Journal, 2023) and “Reputation vs Selection Effects in Markets with Informational Asymmetries” (Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming).

Theo Alysandratos