Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

The most fundamental solution concepts in Game Theory - Nash equilibrium, backward induction, and iterated elimination of dominated strategies - are based on the assumption that people are capable of predicting others' actions. These concepts require people to be able to view the game from the...

Although both economists and psychologists seek to identify determinants of heterogeneity in behavior, they use different concepts to capture them. In this review we first analyze the extent to which economic preferences and psychological concepts of personality – such as the Big Five and...

Incentive schemes affect performance and priorities of agents but, in reality, they can be complicated even for simple tasks. We analyze the effects of the salience of incentives in a team production setting where the principal has an interest in quantity and quality of output. We use data from...

This paper demonstrates gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. It also contributes to a growing literature relating economic preference parameters to psychological measures by asking whether variations in preference parameters among persons, and in particular across genders,...

Previous research shows that firms shroud high add-on prices in competitive markets with naive consumers leading to inefficiency. We analyze the effects of regulatory intervention via educating naive consumers on equilibrium prices and welfare. Our model allows firms to shroud, unshroud, or...

This paper uses basic empirical facts from attention and perception psychology for a behavioral approach to equilibrium analysis at the industry and the macroeconomic level. The paper endogenously determines whether an economy is information-rich and whether scarcity of attention complements...

This paper examines how employment protection legislation affects location decisions of multinationals. Based on a simple theoretical framework, we estimate an empirical model, using OECD-data on bilateral FDI-flows and employment protection indices. We find that, while an "unfavourable"...

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks on an 11-point scale, we find...

This paper analyses the savings behaviour of natives and immigrants in Germany. It is argued that uncertainty about future income and legal status (in case of immigrants) is a key component in the determination of the level of precautionary savings. Using the German Socio-economic Panel data it...