Spantidaki, Evangelia
Contact Information
Available for interviews at
European Job Market for Economists (EEA)
Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA)
Research interests
Behavioural and Experimental Economics, Matching, Personality Traits.
Placement Officer
Libertad González [email protected]
References
Larbi Alaoui (Advisor) [email protected] |
Jan Eeckhout [email protected] |
Antonio Penta [email protected] |
Gaël Le Mens [email protected] |
Research
"How Narcissists Match and Play in Games" (Job Market Paper)
In this paper, I study whether homophily arises endogenously, i.e. by choice of partners. In particular, I study how the ensuing game partners play -be it collaboration, competition or trust and fairness- affects the type of partner players choose as well as how they play. This approach is applicable to any individual characteristic (e.g. gender, race or personality traits). In particular, I study the role of narcissism, a personality trait normally distributed in the general population. I find that no matter how narcissistic participants are, they tend to prefer to be matched with less narcissistic individuals in all games. Participants correctly anticipate that being matched with a narcissistic individual will yield lower payoffs and they adjust their behavior accordingly. Those with higher levels of narcissism contribute/offer less in the contexts of collaboration and fairness. In addition to this, participants respond with lower levels of contribution to partners that score high in narcissism.
"Narcissism and Self-Selection in Competition"
I investigate whether individuals of different narcissism levels and same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment and the role of identifiability in their decision. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve an effort and a luck task, first under a non-competitive and then a competitive payment scheme. I find that there are no narcissism differences in performance ex ante. Among the participants that choose to enter a competition in the effort task, the probability of succeeding is higher for people high in narcissism because they self-select better. This difference is explained by the fact that low skilled and high in narcissism individuals choose not to enter the competition since this could be an ego-threatening situation. I do not find this difference in the luck task, where the ego threat is no longer active, and high and low skilled narcissistic participants do not differ in their selection.
"The Role of Big 5 in Economic Games and Partner Selection"
I study experimentally the criteria people follow when selecting partners in different economic settings. I advance my prior work on matching and narcissism and I connect it to the Big 5 (Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism and Extraversion). In particular, I investigate the way participants evaluate relevant information about someone's behavior, what aspect of their personality they consider as more informative, and how these traits predict behavior. I find that participants choose according to the principle of homophily with respect to their scores on the trait conscientiousness and that participants that score high on agreeableness are preferred across all contexts of interaction.