Sebastian J. Goerg is a Behavioral and Experimental Economist who investigates how incentives, information, and (legal) institutions influence actual human behavior. Together with his co-authors from the social and natural sciences, he pursues an interdisciplinary research agenda.
Prof. Goerg studied Economics at the University of Bonn where he also obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Reinhard Selten. Between 2009 and 2012 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. After research stays at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Michigan, he joined the Florida State University in 2012 as an Assistant Professor. There he was granted tenure in early 2018. In 2018, Prof Goerg joined TUM as an Associate Professor and holds the Chair of Economics at the TUMCS for Biotechnology and Sustainability. Prof. Goerg is Research Fellow at the IZA – Institute for Labor Economics and Research Affiliate at the MPI for Research on Collective Goods.
His work has been published, among others, in the European Economic Review, Experimental Economics, Games and Economic Behavior Management Science, Journal of Labor Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The American Economic Review.
Self-chosen goals, incentives, and effort investigate the interplay between self-chosen work goals and monetary incentives, and their effects on work performance. We observe that the use of personal work goals leads to a significant output increase. Strikingly, the positive effect of self-chosen goals can persist even without performance-contingent monetary incentives. However, then the impact of self-chosen goals depends on the exact size of the goals and the difficulty of the task. Our results suggest that work contracts where workers set goals themselves can help to improve performances; even in the absence of explicit monetary incentives.
Rule Violations and Spillovers investigates how the exposure to rule violations leads to the spreading of rule violations across different domains. We provide causal evidence, that spillover effects exist and that their occurrence is more likely if the underlying decision situations are similar. In addition, through self-contamination, rule violations can spread into even seemingly unrelated situations. Lastly, we demonstrate spillover effects in a field experiment and show that they can lead to adverse behavior at the workplace with actual economic costs.
