In this paper we estimate and empirically test different behavioral theories of consumer reference price formation. Two major theories are proposed to model the reference price reaction: assimilation contrast theory and prospect theory. We assume that different consumer segments will use...

In times of increasing oil prices and a weak dollar, European companies that focus their business on the US market may find themselves in a weak position. While many businesses can hedge this kind of risk by relocating production to the US, or employing financial remedies, these strategies may...

In this paper, the following question is posed: Can the New Keynesian Open Economy Model by Galí and Monacelli (2005b) explain Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomicsʺ, as documented in Obstfeld and Rogoff (2000b)? The model features a small open economy with complete markets, Calvo...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

We consider the problem of optimal consumption for an investor who is risk and uncertainty avers. We model these preferences of the investor with the help of a convex risk-measure. Apart from consumption the agent has the possibility to invest initial capital and random endowment in a market...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...

We measure willingness to pay for privacy in a field experiment. Participants were given the choice to buy a maximum of one DVD from one of two online stores. One store consistently required more sensitive personal data than the other, but otherwise the stores were identical. In one treatment,...

We exploit the natural experiment of the 2005 income tax reform in Germany to study the effects of tax incentives on consumer behavior in life insurance markets. Our empirical analysis of sociodemographic, economic, and psychological household characteristics elicited in the German SAVE study...

Smith et al. (1988) reported large bubbles and crashes in experimental asset markets, a result that has been replicated by a large literature. Here we test whether the occurrence of bubbles depends on the experimental subjects' cognitive sophistication. In a two-part experiment, we first run a...

We propose a general class of Markov-switching-ARFIMA processes in order to combine strands of long memory and Markov-switching literature. Although the coverage of this class of models is broad, we show that these models can be easily estimated with the DLV algorithm proposed. This algorithm...