Ausgangspunkt sind die bekannten empirischen Verstöße gegen Axiome der Bernoulli-Rationalität und die Diskussion um seine präskriptive Ausschließlichkeit. Der Beitrag teilt Nichterwartungsnutzenkalküle in Kategorien ein, die sich für eine Modellierung unterschiedlicher Arten von...

Economists generally assume that the state has sufffcient institutional capacityto support markets and levy taxes, assumptions which cannot be taken forgranted in many states, neither historcally nor in today’s developing world.Our paper develops a framework where "policy choices" in market...

Recent developments in voting theory show that Condorcet profiles embedded in electoratesare responsible for conflicts between pairwise voting methods and for reversals ofrankings under positional methods whenever candidates are dropped or added. Because ofthe strong symmetry of the rankings of...

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing mo-tivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. “Over-stylizing” neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates...

I conduct an experiment to assess whether majority voting on a nonbindingsharing norm affects subsequent behavior in a dictator game. Ina baseline treatment, subjects play a one shot dictator game. In a votingtreatment, subjects are first placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and vote onthe...

Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company’s business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...

We test for behavioral differences between groups and individuals in gift-exchange experiments. Related studies establish group behavior as typically closer to the game-theoretic equilibrium. We show that this result my depend crucially on the decision making procedure within groups. A novel...

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation andinequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised isendogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrastwith the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between...

We report a surprising property of u-o-preferences: the assumption of nonincreasing relative risk aversion implies the optimal portfolio being riskless. We discuss a solution of that paradox in detail. (JEL D80, G11, D10).

This paper examines the impact of mass media and information andcommunications technologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures oneconomic development. The results strongly suggest that both mass me-dia and ICT penetration are negatively associated with corruption. Thisresult holds across...