The relationship between trust and risk is a topic of enduring interest. Although there are substantial differences between the ideas the terms express, many researchers from different disciplines have pointed out that these two concepts become very closely related in personal exchange contexts....

The existing evidence from laboratory experiments suggests that relatively simple heuristics describe observed search behavior better than the optimal stopping rule derived under risk neutrality. Such behavior could be generated by two entirely different classes of decision rules: (i) rules that...

We use a laboratory experiment to investigate the effect that assuming rational expectations has on structural inference in a dynamic discrete choice decision problem. Our experimental design induces preferences up to each subject’s subjective rates of time preference, leaving...

Many motives for saving a portion of one’s income co-exist and their relative importance changes over the life-cycle. However, most existing work focuses on only one of those motives and makes simplifying assumptions about the other motives so that they can be relegated to the background....

Important empirical information on household behavior is obtained from surveys. However, various interdependent factors that can only be controlled to a limited extent lead to unit and item nonresponse, and missing data on certain items is a frequent source of difficulties in statistical...

We use unique administrative German data to examine the role of childhood health for the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Specifically, we examine the extent to which a comprehensive list of health conditions – diagnosed by government physicians – can account for...

Many economists and policy-makers argue that households do not save enough to maintain an adequate standard of living during retirement. However, there is no consensus on the answer to the underlying question what this standard should be, despite the fact that it is crucial for the design of...

The curvature of utility functions varies between people. We suggest that there is a relationship between individual differences in preferred decision mode (intuition vs. deliberation) and the curvature of the individual utility function. If a person habitually prefers a deliberative mode, the...

The purpose of this document is to describe methodological details of the German SAVE survey and to provide users of SAVE with all necessary information for working with the publicly available SAVE dataset.