Alleviating rural poverty remains an important objective of development policy in many areas of the world. However, traditional means of increasing rural livelihoods such as increased investments in agricultural intensification measures can have disastrous impacts on natural resources such as...

This article reports data from a questionnaire study indicating that in a consumer choice problem, additional choice options can cause a tangible disutility that people prefer to avoid if the additional options exhibit features that conflict with those of the old ones, for example, lottery...

We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information...

<span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">This paper analyses the welfare effects of microfinance and inflation in developing countries. Therefore, we introduce a moral hazard problem into a monetary search model with money and credit. We show how access to basic financial services affects households' decisions to borrow, to save and to...</span>

<span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">We analyze the doping behavior of heterogeneous athletes in an environment of private information. In a n-player strategic game, modeled as an all-pay auction, each athlete has private information about his actual physical ability and choses the amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The use of...</span>

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes — the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (2011) — with respect to (a) their within-subject stability over...

How can an argument that is based on assumptions known to be false deliver any insightful conclusions let alone be used for policy recommendations? Over the years, a variety of concerns regarding (micro-)economic modelling and its relevance for real life have been expressed along these lines....

This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to provide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution...