This paper investigates individuals' expectations about their own survival to older ages and compares patterns in average responses about survival chances with actual and projected survival rates. The extent to which individuals have, on average, accurate expectations about survival to older...

This paper provides derivations necessary for solving an optimal consumption problem with multiplicative habits and a CRRA 'outer' utility function either for a microeconomic problem with both labor income risk and rate-of-return risk or for a macroeoconomic representative agent model.

Neoclassical economic theory rules out systematic errors in consumption choice. According to the basic view, individuals know what they choose. They are able to predict how much utility an activity or a good produces for them now and in the future and they can maximize their utility. This...

Goals are an important source of motivation. But little is known about why and how people set them. We address these questions in a model based on two stylized facts from psychology and behavioral economics: i) Goals serve as reference points for performance. ii) Present-biased preferences...

It is a puzzle why people often evaluate consequences of choices separately (narrow bracketing) rather than jointly (broad bracketing). We study the hypothesis that a present-biased individual, who faces two tasks, may bracket his goals narrowly for motivational reasons. Goals motivate because...

Unternehmen stehen im Zeichen von Wandel und Krisen wie der Corona Pandemie unter mas-sivem Handlungs- und Veränderungsdruck. Wirtschaftsskandale wie die Insolvenz von Wirecard - immerhin einem DAX Unternehmen - sorgen für zusätzlichen gesellschaftlichen Druck. Zugleich schafft die...

Instrumente des Change Managements dienen in erster Linie dazu, Veränderungshemmnisse in Organisationen zu überwinden. Eine Voraussetzung für einen adäquaten Einsatz der Instrumente besteht darin, die Gründe für solche Hemmnisse zu identifizieren – eine Diagnose stellt eine wesentliche...

Numerous laboratory studies report on behaviors inconsistent with rational economic models. How much do these inconsistencies matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to learn from experiences? We report on a field experiment designed to...

While most economic studies of crime have focused on its determinants, we study the reverse question: does crime affect economic behavior? Being such an important social phenomenon, one would expect crime to affect economic decisions. Using local data on crime rates and savings per capita in a...

Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...