This research note empirically investigates whether cash can prevent consumers from making needless purchases in unexpected shopping situations. Cash can have a disciplinary effect on short-term consumption because it imposes a strong temporary budget constraint and also reinforces the pain of...

What is the role of heterogenous house-price expectations for boom-bust cycles in the housing market? We exploit a unique Dutch panel data set on households' house price expectations and their consumption, savings and housing choices for the period 2003-2016. This period was characterized by a...

Household over-indebtedness has increased worldwide. This study investigates one possible reason for this increase: biased income expectations. Thereby, we refer to the "permanent income hypothesis", which predicts that individuals borrow more today if they expect a higher income in the future....

Exploiting the natural experiment of the German reunification, we examine how consumers adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. We document that East Germans expect higher inflation and make larger forecast errors than West Germans even decades after reunification....

Many studies examine the effect of environmental values on environmental behavior. In such empirical analyses it is typically at least implicitly assumed that environmental values are independent of economic preferences from behavioral economics like risk and time preferences, trust, or...

An increasing number of workers participate in online labor markets. In contrast to traditional employment relationships within firms, the interaction between online workers and their employers are short and impersonal, which makes motivating online workers more challenging. We present results...

We present online-experimental evidence that challenges the generalizability of established results on subsidizing giving by considering a "quantity donation" scheme. We define this scheme as one in which donors choose how many units of a charitable good to fund, rather than the amount of money...

Individuals often desire to achieve certain outcomes, but potentially lack the procedural knowledge on how to do so. This study provides causal evidence that imperfect procedural knowledge is a severe obstacle to efficient behavior, but can be overcome by providing low-cost information. I...

Volunteering is a widespread allocation mechanism at the workplace and emerges naturally in open-source software development, the generation of online knowledge platforms, and to some extent in "agile" work environments. Using a field experiment with 8 treatments and close to 2,800 workers on an...

Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender differences in competitiveness that are observed in traditional patriarchic as well as in modern societies? We experimentally assess men's and women's preferences to compete in a traditional society where women and men have similar rights and...