Polina Detkova
Welcome! I am a graduate student in the Social Sciences PhD program at Caltech. I am primarily interested in Experimental Economics.
I am on the job market during the 2024-2025 academic year!
CV; Google Scholar; Job Market Paper
Contact: pdetkova@caltech.edu
Working papers
Job Market Paper: Failing to Plan or Planning to Fail? A Study on Commitment Failure (with Egor Stoyan)
Studies on commitment products report high failure rates. These rates are concerning as failures leave individuals worse off than if they had not taken the contract. We explore whether some failures are planned, with individuals expecting future uncertainty to make it sometimes optimal to fail. We term this planning for the possibility of failure, which differs from failing to plan (mistakes made when taking contracts). We run a new controlled laboratory experiment to identify planning patterns. According to our estimates, more than a third of total commitment take-up reflects them. This result suggests that planning for the possibility of failure is widespread, so high failure rates do not necessarily stem from mistakes, and they alone cannot undermine the use of commitment contracts.
We study how people think others update their beliefs upon encountering new evidence. We find that when two individuals share the same prior, one believes that new evidence cannot systematically shift the other’s beliefs in either direction (Martingale property). When the two have different priors, people think that any information brings others’ expected posteriors closer to their own prior, but this adjustment is less responsive to information quality than theory predicts. We identify the primary cause of this insensitivity and discuss the implications of our findings for strategic games with asymmetric information, information design, and, more broadly, for understanding societal polarization.
People often hesitate to ask for help, even when in great need. Promoting asking can mitigate the information asymmetry between those in need and those willing to help. I experimentally study the identifiability of the helper, which is one potential tool for increasing the frequency of requests. In my Prolific experiment, I vary whether the asker knows the (uninformative) ID number of the person receiving the request. I find that providing an uninformative ID number increases the asking rate from 67 to 76.5 percentage points. Since uninformative ID numbers are a very weak form of identification, the results have broad applications.
Publications
Gender heterogeneity of bureaucrats in attitude to corruption: Evidence from list experiment (with Andrei Yakovlev and Andrey Tkachenko). Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2021.
A high level of corruption usually constrains economic development in emerging countries. However, anti-corruption campaigns often fail because the relevant policies need to be implemented by existing corrupt governments. This article studies the extent of bureaucrats’ heterogeneity in attitude to the problem of corruption. Due to the sensitivity of direct questions on corruption, we conduct the list experiment among public procurement officials in Russia. We show that female bureaucrats consider corruption an obstacle to public procurement development, and find no such evidence for male bureaucrats. This heterogeneity holds even at the high-level occupied positions. Although the negative attitude to corruption does not necessarily imply the anti-corruption activity by women, recognition of the problem seems to be a prerequisite for supporting an anti-corruption policy.
The Changing Perceptions of Corruption during the COVID Pandemic in Russia (with Andrei Yakovlev, Andrey Tkachenko, Pavel Pronin). In: Procurement in Focus: Rules, Discretion, and Emergencies (2021). Editors: O.Bandiera, E.Bosio, G. Spagnolo.
This paper studies the dynamic changes in corruption perceptions by public buyers and suppliers in Russia during the COVID pandemic. We conduct an online list experiment among the market participants in three waves: before the pandemic spread, during the strict lockdown, and after some stabilization. The paper shows a gap in how the market participants blame their side on corruption in public procurement. It is negligible before the COVID pandemic and significantly enlarges with the progress of the pandemic. We find that buyers’ perception of corruption among buyers is lower when the number of officially published new COVID cases is high. However, suppliers’ perception of corruption among suppliers is significantly higher when the excess deaths are high. These results indicate the changes in how market participants comprehend what interactions are corrupt. Some informal practices of buyers, which were forbidden before the COVID pandemic, are not perceived as abuse anymore. Suppliers, observing these revealed informal practices and becoming more dependent on public demand during the COVID pandemic, believe in the growth of corruption among suppliers.
Corruption, centralization and competition: Evidence from Russian public procurement (with Elena Podkolzina and Andrey Tkachenko). International Journal of Public Administration, 2018.
This paper estimates the impact of corruption on the incentives of procurers to maintain honest competition in tenders. Customers, who procure for themselves, and Agencies, who procure for the customers in their region are considered. Basing on a large dataset of open auctions conducted by Russian regional-level authorities in 2011, the analysis shows that in highly corrupt regions, Agencies fail to arrange competitive tenders and most of auctions have one bidder. Customers attract more bidders for large contracts, but rebates are usually low. Therefore, procurement centralization may reduce the corruption of Customers, but cannot solve the problem of low competition.