Measuring economic uncertainty is crucial for understanding investment decisions by individuals and firms. Macroeconomists increasingly rely on survey data on subjective expectations. An innovative approach to measure aggregate uncertainty exploits the rounding patterns in individuals' responses...

This paper focuses on egocentric biases in financial decisions. Subjects first designa portfolio, whereby each combination of assets yields the same expected returnand variance of returns. They are then confronted with two alternative portfolios;the average portfolio and the portfolio of one’s...

We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

The gap in university enrollment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey, 74 percent of German university graduates, but only 36 percent of those without a university degree favor a university education for their children. The latter are more...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...

The standard framework for analyzing games with incomplete information models players as if they have an infinite depth of reasoning, which is not always consistent with experimental evidence. This paper generalizes the type spaces of Harsanyi (1967-1968) so that players can have a finite depth...

This paper constructs a type space that contains all types with a finite depth of reasoning, as well as all types with an infinite depth of reasoning - in particular those types for whom finite-depth types are conceivable, or think that finite-depth types are conceivable in the mind of other...

In an important paper, Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that if players have an infinite depth of reasoning and this is commonly believed, types generically have a unique rationalizable action in games that satisfy a richness condition. We show that this result does not extend to environments...

The standard framework for analyzing games with incomplete information models players as if they form beliefs about their opponents' beliefs about their opponents' beliefs and so on, that is, as if players have an infinite depth of reasoning. This strong assumption has nontrivial implications,...