This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural...

For a long time, migration has been subject to intensive economic research. Nevertheless, empirical evidence regarding the determinants of migration still appears to be incomplete. In this paper, we analyze the effects of socio-economic and institutional determinants, especially labor-market...

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third...

Institutions are governance tools. They are useful only if they impact on behaviour: of citizens, and of those administering the legal system. Models of behaviour are therefore crucial for institutional analysis and design. In light of this, this paper draws lessons for institutional analysis...

We claim that understanding human decisions requires that both automatic and deliberate processes be considered. First, we sketch the qualitative differences between two hypothetical processing systems, an automatic and a deliberate system. Second, we show the potential that connectionism offers...

Classic behavioral decision research has intensively explored deliberate processes in decision making. Accordingly, individuals are viewed as bounded rational actors who, because of cognitive limitations, use simple heuristics that are successful in certain environments. In this chapter, it is...

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. We argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information...

It has been shown that in decision making evaluations of evidence and attributes are modified. In three studies it was investigated if this finding of coherence shifts generalizes to real-world probabilistic inference decisions which are made from given probabilistic cues. Using a...

Socio-economic decisions are commonly explained by rational cost vs. benefit considerations, whereas person variables have not usually been considered. The present study aims at investigating the degree to which dispositional power motivation and affective states predict socio-economic...