Depending on the context at hand, people's preference for receiving feedback might differ. Especially in allocation decisions that directly concern another individual, feedback from the affected person can have positive or negative value. We study such preferences in a laboratory experiment by...

Overweighting private information is often used to explain various detrimental decisions. In behavioral economics and finance, it is usually modeled as a direct consequence of misperceiving signal reliability. This bias is typically dubbed overconfidence and linked to the judgment literature in...

Policymakers interested in increasing private provision of public goods have been attempting to improve information availability, so as to enhance individuals' ability to make socially responsible choices. Nevertheless, individuals are often observed to contribute to public goods without knowing...

We investigate consumer inattention and imperfect information regarding the financial benefits of energy-efficient lighting using a randomized controlled trial with 1,084 observations. Results suggest that subjects generally know about cost savings of LED bulbs - the central lighting technology...

How do individuals value noisy information that guides economic decisions? In our laboratory experiment, we find that individuals under-react to increasing the informativeness of a signal, thus undervalue high-quality information, and that they disproportionately prefer information that may...

The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurance) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned, when...

Much of economics assumes that higher incentives increase participation in a transaction only because they exceed more people's reservation price. This paper shows theoretically and experimentally that when information about the consequences is costly, higher incentives also change reservation...

We show that firms' credit market experience determines their perception of aggregate bank lending policy using panel data from the Austrian Business Survey between 2011 and 2016. Loan rejections have a strongly negative and persistent effect on perceptions. Interestingly, firms that receive a...

We explore whether behavioral biases impede the effective processing and interpretation of soft information in private lending. Taking advantage of the internal reporting system of a large federal credit union, we delineate three important biases likely to affect the lending process: (1) limited...

Understanding how observers attribute intentionality to people in the focus of their attention helps in shedding light on punishment behavior. In this paper we approach impartial observers' attributions of intentionality and the attachment of praise and blame to perpetrators of external effects....