In prosocial decisions, decision-makers face interpersonal uncertainty - uncertainty about how their choices impact others' utility. We use three approaches to show how it shapes classic patterns of prosocial behavior like ingroup favoritism, merit-based fairness, and self-favoring behavior....

Entrepreneurship scholars are interested in understanding and describing how entrepreneurs make decisions under uncertainty, where the probabilities of outcomes are not known but perceived, resulting in ambiguous probabilities. In this context, ambiguity refers to the lack of precise and...

Overconfidence is a well-established bias in which someone's subjective confidence in their own judgments is systematically greater than their objective accuracy. There is abundant anecdotal evidence that overconfident people increase their exposure to risk. In this paper, we test whether...

In this paper we propose the use of machine learning methods to estimate inequality of opportunity. We illustrate how our proposed methods - conditional inference regression trees and forests - represent a substantial improvement over existing estimation approaches. First, they reduce the risk...

A simple principal agent problem is experimentally investigated in which a principal repeatedly sets a wage and an agent responds by choosing an effort level. The principal's payoff is determined by the agent's effort. In a first setting the principal can only set a fixed wage in each period. In...

Analyzing the neutrality of referees during twelve German premier league (1st Bundesliga) football seasons, this paper documents evidence that social forces influence agents' preferences and decisions. Those, who are appointed to be impartial, tend to favor the home team as they systematically...

Economic research on gender gaps has focused on variation based on the binary classification of "men" and "women". We explore whether a self-reported continuous measure of gender identity (CGI) explains variation in economic decisions and outcomes beyond the relationship with binary gender. We...

The confirmation bias is a well-known form of motivated reasoning that serves to protect an individual from cognitive discomfort. Hearing rival viewpoints or belief-opposing information creates cognitive dissonance, and so avoiding exposure to, or discounting the validity of, dissonant...

Using data from the long-running German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 1984-2008, this paper analyses the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that preferences and choices relating to life goals/values, partner’s personality, hours of work,...