Margaret Samahita

Margaret Samahita

Assistant Professor

School of Economics

University College Dublin

About

I am Assistant Professor (with tenure) at the School of Economics, University College Dublin and Research Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy. I hold a PhD in Economics from Lund University.

My research is in behavioural economics, where I use theoretical, empirical and (primarily) experimental methods to study individual decision-making. In particular, I focus on how social image, norms, and beliefs shape behaviour in labour markets and institutional settings.

Contact: margaret.samahita@ucd.ie

CV: [pdf]

Research

Working Papers

Strategic confidence? The gender confidence gap and anticipated discrimination in economics peer-review (with Martina Zanella) Reject and Resubmit at Journal of Human Resources

Religious behaviour, labour supply, and social conformity: Evidence from a workplace ban on Muslim religious veiling (with Kevin Devereux and Blair Long)

Paying more or hassling less? Experimental evidence on administrative burdens, incentives, and grant take-up (with Leonhard K. Lades and Glenn McNamara)

The benefit of collective intelligence in community-based content moderation is limited by overt political signalling (with Gabriela Juncosa, Saeedeh Mohammadi and Taha Yasseri)

 

Selected Work in Progress

Funhouse reflections: Social media perceptions and charitable donations (with Pierluigi Conzo, Andrea Gallice and Juan S. Morales)

Manager gender and employee preferences: Evidence from a survey experiment (with Petru Calenici and Demid Getik)

Ambiguity and the variance of gambles: An experiment (with Yung-Shiang Jasmine Yang and Karl Whelan)

Luxury beliefs and welfare loss: Ignorance, horizontal or vertical signalling? (with Demid Getik)

Publications

Economics

Conformity and silence: Experimental evidence on social pressure and free speech (with Juan S. Morales)
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2026, 249: 107725

“Luxury beliefs”: Signaling through ideology?
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2026, 121: 102538

Anchoring and subjective belief distributions (with Hakan J. Holm, Erik Wengström & Roel van Veldhuizen)
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, 240: 107304

Unraveling gender norms: Social and personal norms in the preferential promotion of women (with Manuel E. Lago & Orla Doyle)
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2025, 115: 102336

The inelastic demand for affirmative action (with Demid Getik & Marco Islam)
European Economic Review, 2024, 170: 104862

Are economics conferences gender-neutral? Evidence from Ireland (with Kevin Devereux)
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2024, 86(1): 101–118 [podcast]

Gender, productivity, and promotion in the Irish economics profession (with Kevin Devereux)
Economics Bulletin, 2023, 43(3): 1225–1234 [podcast]

No mood effects in the field: The case of car inspections (with Hakan J. Holm)
Journal of Economic Psychology, 2023, 96: 102612

Too much commitment? An online experiment with tempting YouTube content (with Claes Ek)
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2023, 208: 21–38 [online appendices]

Pay-what-you-want in competition
The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, 2020, 20(1): 20180063 [pdf]

Curating social image: Experimental evidence on the value of actions and selfies (with Hakan J. Holm)
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2018, 148: 83–104 [radio]

Venting and gossiping in conflicts: Verbal expression in ultimatum games
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2017, 67: 111–121

Pay-what-you-want pricing schemes: A self-image perspective (with Goytom Abraha Kahsay)
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 2015, 7: 17–28

Effect of effort on self-image: Monotonically increasing self-image functions
Economics Bulletin, 2013, 33(1): 152–157

 

Interdisciplinary

Vulnerability to and acceptability of different types of sludge (with Leonhard K. Lades, Lucie Martin, Cass R. Sunstein & Martin Baekgaard)
Behavioural Public Policy, 2025, 1–30

Compliance spending aversion: An unintended consequence of charity regulation (with Leonhard K. Lades)
Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 2023, 6(1): 1–30

Can ♥s change minds? Social media endorsements and policy preferences (with Pierluigi Conzo, Laura K. Taylor, Juan S. Morales & Andrea Gallice)
Social Media + Society, 2023, 9(2) [the conversation]
Erratum: Figure 5 right panel should be this

What drives home solar PV uptake? Subsidies, peer effects and visibility in Sweden (with Luis Mundaca)
Energy Research & Social Science, 2020, 60: 101319

Behavioural economics for energy and climate change policies and the transition to a sustainable energy use: A Scandinavian perspective (with Luis Mundaca, Jonas Sonnenschein & Roman Seidl)
In M. Lopes, C. Henggeler Antunes & K. B. Janda (Eds.), Energy and Behavior: Towards a Low Carbon Future, 2020, pp. 45–87, London: Academic Press

 

Large-scale Research Collaborations

The sources of researcher variation in economics (with Nick Huntington-Klein, Claus C. Portner, Ian McCarthy & the Many Economists Collaborative on Researcher Variation)
Journal of Economic Literature, 2026, accepted

Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences (with Balazs Aczel, Barnabas Szaszi, Harry T. Clelland, Marton Kovács, Felix Holzmeister, Don van Ravenzwaaij, Hannah Schulz-Kümpel, Sabine Hoffmann, Gustav Nilsonne, Livia Kosa, Zoltan A. Torma, the Multi100 Collaboration & Brian A. Nosek)
Nature, 2026, 652: 135–142

Reproducibility in Management Science (with Miloš Fišar, Ben Greiner, Christoph Huber, Elena Katok, Ali I. Ozkes & the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration)
Management Science, 2024, 70(3): 1343–1356

On the trajectory of discrimination: A meta-analysis and forecasting survey capturing 44 years of field experiments on gender and hiring decisions (with Michael Schaerer, Christilene du Plessis, My Hoang Bao Nguyen, Robbie C. M. van Aert, Leo Tiokhin, Daniël Lakens, Elena Giulia Clemente, Thomas Pfeiffer, Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, Cory J. Clark, the Gender Audits Forecasting Collaboration & Eric Luis Uhlmann)
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2023, 179: 104280

Creative destruction in science (with Warren Tierney, Jay H. Hardy III, Charles R. Ebersole, Keith Leavitt, Domenico Viganola, Elena Giulia Clemente, Michael Gordon, Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, Thomas Pfeiffer, the Hiring Decisions Forecasting Collaboration & Eric Luis Uhlmann)
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2020, 161: 291–309

 

Policy Papers

Luxury beliefs, distributional fairness and public policy in Ireland (with Ciara O’Donnell)
PublicPolicy.ie Policy Paper, 2026

Assessing administrative burdens as barriers to implementation of Ireland’s Climate Action Plan (with Cara Augustenborg, Patricia Lentz, Leonhard K. Lades & Lucie Martin)
Environmental Protection Agency Research Report 513, 2026

Reducing friction, promoting fairness: Behavioural perspectives on sludge in Irish public services (with Leonhard K. Lades)
PublicPolicy.ie Policy Paper, 2026

 

Teaching

Current Teaching

Advanced Microeconomics - MSc Economics

Decision Theory - MSc Economics

Economics of Gender - BSc Economics