RSSE: Jonathan Stäbler (Masaryk University in Brno) Fraud and Motivated Reasoning in Competition

It is our pleasure that Jonathan Stäbler (Masaryk University in Brno) will present on Thursday, April 30, 2026, at 12:45 in room RB437 about the topic “Fraud and Motivated Reasoning in Competition”.

Registration is not required and anyone who would like to attend is warmly invited.

It is also possible to participate online via MS Teams at this link. In case of any connection issues, please contact lubomir.cingl@vse.cz.

ABSTRACT: Fraudulent behavior is common in competitive environments, yet its contributing factors are still not well understood. We investigate whether motivated reasoning about others’ fraudulent behavior is a key factor, i.e., whether individuals strategically bias their beliefs to reduce the moral costs of fraud. Across two experiments, which manipulate strategic considerations during belief formation, we find no evidence that motivated reasoning influences fraud or effort provision in competition. This result contrasts with previous evidence that motivated reasoning facilitates fraud in non-competitive environments. We show that our precise null results are not a consequence of competition. Instead, we fail to replicate previous findings from non-competitive environments despite a highly powered design (80\% power to identify half of the original effect size). Our results thus call into question the robustness of motivated reasoning in explaining fraud more generally.

BIO: Jonathan Stäbler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Economics at Masaryk University in Brno. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Mannheim and the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences. His research lies at the intersection of experimental and behavioral economics, public economics, and political economy. Stäbler’s work examines destructive and fraudulent behavior in competitive environments, such as sabotage, cheating, antisocial preferences, and motivated beliefs, and investigates how institutional rules (e.g., information disclosure or punishment mechanisms) can mitigate welfare-reducing outcomes; he also studies the emergence and enforcement of social norms using theoretically grounded laboratory and online experiments.