Research

Overview

My research focuses on poverty, financial decision-making, and the psychology of asking and rejection.

Published & Submitted Work 

Cash Can Make Its Absence Felt: Randomizing Unconditional Cash Transfer Amounts in the US. Ania Jaroszewicz, Jon Jachimowicz, Oliver Hauser, & Julian Jamison. Submitted.

We randomized over 5,000 Americans in poverty to receive $500, $2,000, or nothing, then measured their well-being through surveys administered one, six, and 15 weeks later. Although bank data reveal that people spent the money, we find no evidence that (more) cash improved survey outcomes: estimates are overwhelmingly negative or indistinguishable from zero, in contrast to experts' and laypeople's predictions. Our data suggest that the windfall made participants’ (unmet) needs more salient, which caused distress. We rationalize these findings through a model that illustrates how receiving cash can at times also highlight its absence.

It Hurts to Ask. Roland Bénabou, Ania Jaroszewicz, & George Loewenstein. Submitted.

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need and a potential helper. Our model emphasizes the strategic interdependence of these decisions, highlighting what each player infers about the other based on the actions they (do not) take. It provides an explanation for why people may not ask, even when most helpers would help if told about the need; how a failure to offer (despite having an opportunity to do so) may itself deter asking; and how a greater need may in some cases reduce the propensity to ask. The model has applications to a range of settings (e.g., salary negotiations, requests to stop harassment), shedding light on the determinants of asking and giving behaviors and how to reduce inefficiencies in such interactions. 

Offering, Asking, Consenting, and Rejecting: The Psychology of Helping Interactions. Ania Jaroszewicz,  George Loewenstein, & Roland Bénabou. Submitted.

Two distinct literatures have shown that people are averse to being rejected when seeking help and to rejecting others’ requests for help---that is, both parties prefer situations where no ask was made to those where an ask was made but rejected. We develop a game-theoretic framework to explain and further extend these findings. We propose that both the aversion to being rejected after an ask, and the aversion to rejecting others after an ask, can be explained by the fact that rejection signals that the would-be helper does not sufficiently value the person in need. The framework further predicts that the same mechanism leads to an aversion to asks even when help is provided. That is, holding constant whether help is provided, both parties incur a psychological cost whenever there is an ask. Two studies provide empirical support.

The Psychological Pain of Asking for Live Kidney Donations. Ania Jaroszewicz, George Loewenstein, Kelley Canavan, Jennifer Martin, & Amit Tevar.  Submitted.

The need for kidney donations is acute. While most prior research on this problem has focused on potential donors’ behavior, we instead focus on patients, and specifically on their decision to ask prospective living donors to consider giving them an organ. Surveying over 500 kidney disease patients currently on the kidney transplant waitlist, we find that asking is relatively uncommon. We test a range of potential explanations for the limited asking, finding that a major factor is the psychological “pain of asking” for help. Addressing the pain of asking in kidney disease patients’ and prospective donors’ educational and coaching materials could increase patients’ chances of receiving potentially life-saving kidneys. 

A Behavioral Perspective on the Decision to Seek Formal and Informal Financial Help. In: Cash Transfers for Inclusive Societies: A Behavioral Lens. Editors: Saugato Datta, Dilip Soman, & Jiaying Zhao. University of Toronto Press. 2023.

How do people facing financial insecurity decide to seek formal financial help (e.g., government assistance) and informal financial help (e.g., loans from friends and family)? I develop a general framework outlining this decision-making process, then review literature in economics and psychology on the barriers preventing people from seeking this help. Finally, I discuss policy implications, arguing that an understanding of both formal and informal help-seeking processes is crucial for informing policies intended to help financially vulnerable populations. 

The Impact of Agency on Time and Risk Preferences. Ayelet Gneezy, Alex Imas, & Ania Jaroszewicz. Nature, Communications. 2020.

Prior work has found that those facing adverse states such as resource scarcity tend to be more impatient than those who do not face such states. We demonstrate that endowing people with agency over their adverse state (i.e., giving them a choice to address the adversity) fully moderates this effect, increasing patience substantially---even if the greater agency is not utilized. We further demonstrate that agency’s impact on patience is partly driven by greater risk tolerance. Our findings highlight the potential for agency-based policy and institutional design.

Knowing When to Quit: Default Choices, Demographics and Fraud. Robert Letzler, Ryan Sandler, Ania Jaroszewicz, Isaac Knowles, & Luke Olson. The Economic Journal. 2017. 

Employing data from a natural experiment, this paper examines how low- vs. high-socioeconomic status (SES) consumers who were victims of fraud responded differently to interventions designed to help them avoid subsequent fraudulent charges. We find that in the absence of any intervention, low- (vs. high-) SES consumers were better at catching and avoiding the fraudulent charges. However, they were also less likely to benefit from an intervention that required them to understand and act on a fairly complicated informational letter. The results underscore that designing consumer welfare practices in behaviorally-savvy ways (e.g., with defaults and simple language) is particularly important when the goal is to help low- (rather than high-) SES consumers.

The Slider Task: An Example of Restricted Inference on Incentive Effects. Felipe Araujo, Erin Carbone, Lynn Conell-Price, Marli Dunietz, Ania Jaroszewicz, Rachel Landsman, Diego Lamé, Lise Vesterlund, Stephanie Wang, & Alistair Wilson. Journal of the Economic Science Association. 2016.

Researchers often use real-effort tasks when examining responses to incentives. For a real-effort task to be well suited for such an exercise, its measurable output must be sufficiently elastic over the incentives considered.  We test labor responses to three different piece-rate incentives for one popular real-effort task: the slider task. We find that when incentives increased by 1500%, performance increased by only 5%, suggesting that for typical experimental sample sizes and incentives, the slider task is unlikely to demonstrate a meaningful and statistically significant performance response. 

Selected Works in Progress 

A Randomized Controlled Trial on the Provision of Financial and Social Capital to Low-Income Households in the United States. *Ania Jaroszewicz, *Jon Jachimowicz, *Oliver Hauser, Nava Ashraf, Emily Bianchi, Stephan Meier, & Johannes Haushofer. (* denotes equal authorship.) Pre-registration and pre-registration manuscript.

Giving people money directly is a common poverty-alleviation tool. We propose that financial capital alone may be insufficient to fully address the challenges posed by poverty, which include a lack of belongingness, information, and goal-setting accountability---challenges that may be more adequately addressed through social capital. We randomized about 1,500 low-income households in the Boston area to receive either financial capital ($500 per month for 18 months), social capital (encouragement to develop and strengthen social ties), both treatments, or no treatment. Using surveys, administrative bank account data, and administrative welfare receipt data, we will test the extent to which the treatments improved objective and subjective well-being.

(Beliefs About) Beliefs About the Desire for Help. 

Many people who are able to help others do not offer help, and many people who need help do not ask for it. I propose and test one unifying explanation that may contribute to both behaviors. Potential helpers underestimate others’ desire for help (thereby decreasing their likelihood of offering), and those in need fail to recognize the potential helpers’ bias (and therefore lack a basis on which to adjust their own behavior in response, for instance by asking more). Together, the results suggest that incorrect beliefs about the desire for help---and incorrect beliefs about beliefs about the desire for help---act to limit the amount of help that is transferred between parties.

Respectful Rejection in Job Search. Ania Jaroszewicz, Lynn Conell-Price, & Oliver Hauser. 

Does the specific way in which you reject people matter? We study this question in the context of job applications. When rejecting job applicants, firms choose whether to reject explicitly (by informing applicants that they were not selected) or implicitly (by never responding). We find that job applicants overwhelmingly report preferring explicit to implicit rejections. Explicitly rejected applicants feel more respected, believe that the firm treats its employees better, and leave more favorable reviews of the firm. Our results suggest that firms should reject explicitly more often, and that such a shift would benefit them and applicants alike.