I investigate whether two mechanisms leading to biased beliefs about success, overconfidence and competition neglect, influence decisions to enter competitive environments. I use a controlled laboratory setting that allows to elicit belief distributions related to absolute as well as relative...

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...

This paper shows that the possibility of collusion between an agent and a supervisor imposes no restrictions on the set of implementable social choice functions (SCF) and associated payoff vectors. Any SCF and any payoff profile that are implementable if the supervisor's information was public...

We study the inference and experimentation problem of an agent in a situation where the outcomes depend on the individual's intrinsic ability and on an external variable. We analyze the mistakes made by decision-makers who hold inaccurate prior beliefs about their ability. Overconfident...

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...

In this note we shall discuss a concept that - despite its prominence in both Hume (1739) and Smith (1759), its obvious relevance for social behavior, and its not so infrequent use in colloquial language - has never gained a foothold in economic theory: the concept of empathy. Specifically, we...

In der Wissensmanagementforschung wird dem Wissenstransferprozess besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt: Wissenstransfer sichert die Lernfähigkeit und das Innovationspotential und trägt damit zur Wettbewerbs- und Überlebensfähigkeit von Organisationen bei. Obwohl der Wissenstransfer von den...

This paper analyzes the main uncertainty of college saving - the child’s ability - in the context of the saving with learning model. The first section develops a dynamic model combining asset accumulation and learning to explain the parents’ forward-looking saving behavior when they are...

We provide an analysis that might help distinguish rationally justified movements in house prices from potentially non-rational movements, using a two-sector business cycle model, in which investment in housing is subject to collateral constraints. A large portion of the evolution of U.S. house...

We analyse and compare individual beliefs about the effects of competition and their evolution over time in transition economies and experienced market economies. At the onset of transition, competition beliefs in transition countries are far more positive than in market economies. Over time,...