Abstract This study presents results of the validation of an ultra-short survey measure of patience included in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Survey responses predict intertemporal choice behavior in incentive-compatible decisions in a representative sample of the German adult population.

This paper tests how subjects behave in an intertemporal consumption/saving experiment when borrowing is allowed and whether subjects treat debt differently than savings. Two treatments create environments where either saving or borrowing is required for optimal consumption. Since both...

We design an experiment to investigate the influence of announced future variations in interest rates and prices on consumption decisions. In an experimental implementation of the discounted utility model, the subjects learn the entire paths of inflation and interest rates prior to deciding on a...

Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently,...

Previous experimental results (Ballinger et al., 2003 and Carbone and Hey, 2004) have found that many agents fail to correctly take into account the length of the planning horizon also finding some support (See Carbone, 2006) for descriptive models, such as the Rolling Model. This paper presents...

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that broadband access has long depended on customers' position in the voice telecommunication infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The...

Emotions have a strong impact on our everyday lives in general and judgment and decision making in particular. Our paper presents the first study to show that incidental emotions, i.e., emotions not related to the actual choice problem, influence individuals' tax compliance behavior. A survey of...

We report on a series of economic decision-making experiments exploring how individuals make lifecycle consumption and saving plans when they face different income profiles. We find that for every income profile we consider, subjects on average over-consume in the early periods of life and...

If all potential buyers participate in a first-price auction, then (theoretically) the auction price weakly exceeds the price placed by the seller under a posted-price mechanism. However, it is documented that in the online sellers prefer posted-price mechanism to auction. We aim to explain this...

The widespread use of markets leads to unprecedented material well-being in many societies. We study whether market interaction, as a side effect, erodes moral values. An encompassing understanding of the virtues and vices of markets, including their possible impact on moral values, is necessary...