We analyze whether the frequent use of credit lines is rational or influenced by behavioral traits of households. We consider the special case of Germany where credit lines on current accounts are available to 80% of the population. We document that the excessive usage of costly credit lines is...

Auctions often involve goods exhibiting a common knowledge ex-post risk. Precautionary bidding predicts that under expected utility, ex-post risk leads DARA bidders to reduce their bids by more than the appropriate risk premium. Because the degree of riskiness of the good, and bidders risk...

Whether we like it or not we all feel that the world is uncertain. From choosing a new technology to selecting a job, we rarely know in advance what outcome will result from our decisions. Unfortunately, the standard theory of choice under uncertainty developed in the early forties and fifties...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of individual attitudes towards ambiguity, based on laboratory experiments. The design of the analysis allows to capture individual behavior across various levels of ambiguity, ranging from low to high. Attitudes towards risk and attitudes towards...

Ambiguity aversion has shown to be economically relevant and has been proposed as an explanation for many phenomena in economics and finance. While the literature has suggested a large variety of elicitation methods to measure ambiguity preferences, their consistency and reliability it is rarely...