In financial markets, professional traders leverage their trades because it allows to trade larger positions with less margin. Violating margin requirements, however, triggers a margin call and open positions are automatically covered until requirements are met again. What impact does margin...

Behavioural economics attracted attention from environmental economists: it should help to understand why people do not respond to environmental policy measures, based on neoclassical assumptions, as predicted by theory. Moreover, understanding motives and driving forces behind pro-social,...

I conduct an experiment to assess whether majority voting on a non- binding sharing norm affects subsequent behavior in a dictator game. In a baseline treatment, subjects play a one shot dictator game. In a voting treatment, subjects are ï¬rst placed behind a 'veil of ignorance' and vote on...

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing motivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. "Over-stylizing" neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates the...

Global environmental protection is characterized as a public good. In contrast to the national level where the state is able to regulate external effects, there is a lack of supranational institutions which have enough power to force countries to reduce pollution levels. In spite of the...

Using survey data from the International Social Survey Program, we investigate how individual preferences for redistribution and public spending are affected by gender, income and expected future living standard. Applying the concept of the equivalence income, we find that some respondents...

In reality, it is often groups rather than individuals that make decisions. In previous experiments, groups have frequently been shown to act differently from individuals in several ways. It has been claimed that inter-group interactions may be (1) more competitive, (2) more rational, or (3)...

The EU-enlargement in mid-2004 will probably be followed by the accession to the European Monetary and Economic Union (EMU), depending on the individual state of convergence of the accession candidates. As a political rather than an economic decision on EMU enlargement is not beyond imagination,...

We apply the property rights theory of Grossman-Hart-Moore in the music industry and study the optimal allocation of copyright between the artists who create music and the labels who promote and distribute it. Digital technology opens up a role for new intermediaries. We find that entry of...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of knowledge management on the innovation success of firms in Germany. Using a matching procedure on data from the German Innovation Survey of 2003 ("Mannheim Innovation Panel"), we pair firms applying knowledge management with twin firms with...