Organizational rules (standard operating procedures) are, at the same time, enabling and restraining. They are enabling, because, e.g., they represent highly effective coordination instruments and serve as stores of organizational knowledge. On the other hand, they tend to develop a dynamics...

The purpose of this document is to describe methodological details of the German SAVE survey and to provide users of SAVE with all necessary information for working with the publicly available SAVE dataset.

The understanding of human behavior in sequential decision tasks is important for economics and socio-psychological sciences. In search tasks, for example when individuals search for the best price of a product, they are confronted in sequential steps with different situations and they have to...

Assessing the economic impacts of urban land use transformation has become complex and acrimonious. Although community planners are beginning to comprehend the economic trade-offs inherent in transforming the urban fringe, they find it increasingly difficult to analyze and assess the trade-offs...

Many motives for saving a portion of one’s income co-exist and their relative importance changes over the life-cycle. However, most existing work focuses on only one of those motives and makes simplifying assumptions about the other motives so that they can be relegated to the background. All...

The existing evidence from laboratory experiments suggests that relatively simple heuristics describe observed search behavior better than the optimal stopping rule derived under risk neutrality. Such behavior could be generated by two entirely different classes of decision rules: (i) rules that...

We model the optimal reaction of a public PAYG pension system to demographic shocks. We compare the ex-ante first best and second best solution of a Ramsey planner with full commitment to the outcome under simple third best rules that mimic the pension systems observed in the real world. The...

We investigate the development of public pensions in Germany and how its significance will change when the multi-pillar systems matures due to population aging. The message of our analysis is complex. Even after the pension reforms which took place between 2001 and 2007 public pensions will...

Many economists and policy-makers argue that households do not save enough to maintain an adequate standard of living during retirement. However, there is no consensus on the answer to the underlying question what this standard should be, despite the fact that it is crucial for the design of...

This paper documents the implementation of a logical imputation based on the panel structure of the 2003 to 2008 waves of the German SAVE dataset. A new release of the waves 2003-2008 will be available from June 2009. The concept and the principles of the underlying logical panel imputation are...