Paul M. Gorny

Postdoctoral Researcher · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

On the 2025/26 Academic Job Market

Welcome! I am a postdoctoral researcher (Akademischer Rat auf Zeit) at the Chair of Human Resource Management at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). I obtained my PhD from the University of East Anglia and my bachelor's and research track master's degree from the Cologne Graduate School (CGS) at the University of Cologne.

I am a behavioral and experimental economist whose work examines how both gendered language and emerging technologies shape economic behaviour and human interaction. In my job market paper I study how gender embedded in job advertisements influences perceptions and decisions surrounding hiring and applications. Another research stream investigates how the presence of artificial intelligence and robots reshapes human behaviour—particularly within human–human interaction and team collaboration settings.

My research relies primarily on laboratory and field experiments as well as randomized controlled trials, and I complement these with projects using administrative, platform, and textual data. I am strongly committed to methodological innovation, integrating tools such as eye-tracking, biosensors, and advanced computational methods to deepen behavioural insights.

During my PhD, I worked on Contest Theory and Networks with a particular focus on studies that apply to Conflict, Identity and asymmetries in skills, prize valuations, and costs.

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Research

Primary: Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Gender and Gendered Language
Secondary: Experimental Methodology, Networks, Contest

Publications

How Strength Asymmetries Shape Multi-Sided Conflicts

joint with Sebastiàn Cortes-Corrales · Economic Theory, 2024

Older working paper version (incl. a proof that no closed-form solutions exist for non-trivial graphs): Generalising Conflict Networks

Reproducibility in Management Science

by Fišar, M., Greiner, B., Huber, C., Katok, E., Ozkes, A., and the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration · Management Science, 70(3), pp. 1343–2022, 2024

Contributed as a Member of the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration.

Prosocial behavior among human workers in robot-augmented production teams—A field-in-the-lab experiment

joint with Benedikt Renner and Louis Schäfer · Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 2, 1220563, 2023 · preregistration

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

joint with Christoph Huber, Anna Dreber, Jürgen Huber, Magnus Johannesson, Michael Kirchler, Utz Weitzel, Felix Holzmeister and others · PNAS, 120(23), e2215572120, 2023

Working Papers

The Gender of Opportunity: How Gendered Job Titles Affect Job Seeker Attraction

joint with Petra Nieken and Martin Trenkle · Job Market Paper, soon to be submitted · Online Appendix

Language carries information. In labor markets, even minimal linguistic cues in job ads can function as signals that update job seekers’ beliefs about organizational culture and thereby shape application behavior. We study this mechanism using three complementary datasets. In a large-scale field experiment on a major German job platform, switching job titles from the generic masculine to a gender-fair form increases female applications in Business & Management by roughly 50%, with no decline in male applications. This effect is mirrored by a significant increase in female clicks, indicating that the signal operates already at the stage of initial consideration. Effects are absent in Marketing & Sales and in IT & Development overall, but emerge for IT positions posted by non-IT firms–consistent with a belief-updating mechanism that requires sufficiently elastic priors. An online study with hiring experts shows that gender-fair title usage is driven more by genuine support for gender equality than by strategic motives, suggesting that the titles are credible signals of employer type. A laboratory eye-tracking experiment with job seekers confirms that the behavioral response reflects belief-based evaluation rather than automatic visual salience. Together, the evidence demonstrates that language operates as a market signal in recruitment: a virtually costless three-character change can meaningfully expand the applicant pool when prior beliefs have room for updating.

Adaptivity and Revealed Robot Aversion in Human-Robot Collaboration: A Field-in-the-Lab Experiment

joint with Louis Schäfer · under review

We study human-robot collaboration in a controlled experiment run in a realistic production environment. Participants completed a sequential task in pairs, where one worker decided whether to pass intermediate components to a coworker or not. We find strong evidence of robot aversion: workers were significantly less likely to pass intermediate products in the robotic treatments. Adaptivity only marginally affected these outcomes. Our results demonstrate that cooperation and responsibility attribution in hybrid teams depend not only on performance but also on social perceptions of artificial agents.

Predicting Generosity: The Impact of Personalized AI and Human Oversight on Altruistic Behavior

joint with Eva Groos and Christina Strobel · under review

We study how personalized AI predictions affect individual choices in the context of altruistic decisions. Using data from dictator games, we trained an AI tool to generate personalized predictions of dictators' choices. We find that participants sent less when they received predictions, with the strongest reduction when a human overseer withheld the prediction. These findings highlight the need to consider human reactions to AI predictions when assessing both the accuracy and impact of such tools.

Gendered Language, Economic Behavior, and Norm Compliance

joint with Petra Nieken and Karoline Ströhlein · under review, draft available upon request

We conducted a controlled experiment to examine how the gender frame of instructions—male, female, or gender-inclusive—along with norm salience influences norm compliance. We find a statistically significant negative effect of the gender-inclusive frame on norm compliance for almost all participants and a negative effect of the male gender frame on men's norm compliance. These findings contribute to the debate on gender-inclusive language by highlighting its unintended behavioral effects.

Previously circulated as The Effects of Gendered Language on Norm Compliance and He, She, They? The Impact of Gendered Language on Economic Behavior.

Feedback in the Factory—A Novel Field-in-the-Lab Experiment

joint with Petra Nieken and Karoline Ströhlein · soon to be submitted, draft available upon request

We study how the mode of information provision affects productivity in a realistic production environment. We vary whether operational information is unavailable, pushed automatically at fixed intervals, or pulled on demand. Pull information increases output for participants who retool infrequently, whereas the effect reverses for frequent retoolers. Overall, Pull outperforms Baseline, while Push shows no systematic advantage.

Don't Fear the Robots: Automatability and Job Satisfaction

joint with Ritchie C. Woodard

We analyse the correlation between job satisfaction and automatability. Using multiple survey datasets matched with various measures of automatability, we find a negative and statistically significant correlation that is robust to controlling for worker and job characteristics. We provide evidence that monotonicity and low perceived meaning of the job drive both automatability and low job satisfaction.

Conference Proceedings (peer-reviewed)

Seeing Is Feeling: Emotional Cues in Others' Heart Rate Visualizations

joint with Anke Greif-Winzrieth, Verena Dorner, Fabian Wuest, and Christof Weinhardt

Learning Factory Labs as Field-in-the-Lab Environment

joint with Magnus Kandler, Louis Schäfer, Gisela Lanza, Petra Nieken, and Karoline Ströhlein

Decision Experiments in the Learning Factory: A Proof of Concept

joint with Karoline Ströhlein, Magnus Kandler, Petra Nieken, Louis Schäfer, and Gisela Lanza

Human-Oriented Design of Andon-Boards 4.0

joint with Magnus Kandler, Karoline Ströhlein, Sebastian Riedinger, Petra Nieken, and Gisela Lanza

Work in Progress

Assessing the Human Premium: Task Allocation Preferences in a Hybrid Workforce

joint with Aleksandr Alekseev and Mikhail Anufriev · draft in preparation

Predict, Advise, or Perform?—The Role of Automated Systems in Human Interaction

joint with Emike Nasamu and Mengjie Wang · draft in preparation

FrISB-BE — A Framework for Integrating Sensordata and Biosignals in Behavioral Experiments

joint with Fabian Wüst, Anke Greif-Winzrieth, Petra Nieken, and Niklas Busse · beta-version and first conceptual paper soon to be released

Do Personalized AI Predictions Change Subsequent Decision-Outcomes?

joint with Christina Strobel · data gathering

Audience Effects in the Overconfidence Gender Gap

joint with Kevin Grubiak

Exploring Distributional Biases in Responses of Generative AI

joint with Petra Nieken, Abdolkarim Sadrieh, and Frederic Sadrieh

Ongoing Contributions to Crowd-Sourced Projects

#ManyDaughters

#ManyDesignsCarbon

Synthetic Replication Games