Research Statement – Roberto Weber August 2006

Described broadly, my research consists of behavioral and experimental studies of decision-making in economic and organizational contexts, frequently using economic games to study interaction. As a result, my work often lies at the intersection of economics, game theory, organizational behavior, business strategy, and political science. One important goal driving my research is to develop novel laboratory paradigms that bring experiments closer to how we observe economic and organizational phenomena in the real world. Thus, I often attempt to find ways to introduce potentially important features of naturally-occurring economic, organizational, and social environments into laboratory experiments, in order to study how such features influence decisions and outcomes. This approach has produced several important research contributions. My work appears in leading journals in economics (Weber, 2006; American Economic Review), organizational behavior (Weber, Camerer, Rottenstreich & Knez, 2001; Organization Science), management (Weber & Camerer, 2003; Management Science), and game theory (Weber, 2003; Games and Economic Behavior). My work was also recently cited in a Science article, on new frontiers in social science research, as an example of the usefulness of laboratory experiments for understanding behavior in organizations (Butz & Torrey, 2006). Finally, some of my recent work on social preferences is receiving considerable attention because of the novel perspective it adds to our understanding of the motivations for fair and altruistic behavior. In what follows, I describe some of my contributions and briefly discuss my on-going research. I divide my contributions into three broad areas: a) organizations and political institutions, b) behavioral game theory, and c) improved understanding of social preferences.