We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how they robustly explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex...

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how robustly they explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex...

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...

This study examines the effect of a soft commitment device in the form of a savings goal calendar on savings for small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. We run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) under which the treatment group receives a calendar designed to set savings goals and to make a...

We analyze the implication of time-inconsistent preferences in educational decision making and corresponding policies using a structural dynamic choice model. Based on a novel identification approach, we exploit variation in average years invested in degree attainment through various educational...

Risk attitudes have an impact on not only the decision to become an entrepreneur but also the survival and failure rates of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become an entrepreneur,...

This paper complements evidence on the Allais paradox from advanced countries and educated people by a novel investigation in a poor rural area. The share of Allais-type behavior is indeed high and related to characteristics of "lacking ability", such as poor education, unemployment, and little...

This research integrates a standard "cheating" experiment into a broad household survey and finds relationships between individual characteristics and cheating behavior. We allow for attendance of others at the cheating experiment, addressing the "reputation to be seen as honest," finding there...

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is more risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2,100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression and also when we control for a...