Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

Jon Elster gehört zu den profiliertesten Sozialwissenschaftlern der internationalen ‚scientific community'. Der vorliegende Beitrag entwickelt eine Lesart für sein bisher vorliegendes Gesamtwerk: In einem ersten Schritt wird Elsters Kritik an funktionalistischen Fehlschlüssen in den...

This paper provides an introduction to the concept of social capital, and carries out a critical review of the empirical literature on social capital and economic development. The survey points out six main weaknesses affecting the empirics of social capital. Identified weaknesses are then used...

Economists praise the efficiency of the price mechanism in allocating scarce resources. Others, however, often reject it as unfair. In this study, we investigate the extent to which economists also differ from non-economists in how they value the fairness of the price system, and examine how...

For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

In this paper, we examine students' attitudes towards various allocation mechanisms for a scarce resource. For this purpose, we have run a survey among officers of the German military who are enrolled in different courses of study (such as economics) at the University of the German Federal Armed...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

Das Instrument des Emissionshandelssystems (EHS) wird von Umweltökonom:innen an prominenter Stelle zur Bewältigung der ökologischen Krisen sowohl im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs als auch in der Politikberatung empfohlen. Wir arbeiten drei implizite normative Prämissen des Lehrbuchmodells eines...

We study the relationship between positional preferences (i.e., preferences concerning the relative rank or position in comparison to others) and narcissism. We distinguish two dimensions of narcissism: Narcissistic admiration captures self-enhancement through searching for being admired, and...