Most pure public goods like lighthouses, dams, or national defense provide utility mainly by insuring against hazardous events. Our paper focuses on this insurance character of public goods. As for private actions against hazardous events, one can distinguish between self-insurance (SI) and...

This paper presents an experimental test of several independence conditions implied by expected utility and alternative models. We perform a repeated choice experiment and fit an error model that allows us to discriminate between true violations of independence and those that can be attributed...

This paper tests Birnbaum’s (2004) theory that the constant consequence paradoxes of Allais are due to violations of coalescing, the assumption that when two branches lead to the same consequence, they can be combined by adding their probabilities. Rank dependent utility and cumulative...

This note presents an experimental study of the random lottery incentive mechanism. In the baseline treatment we observe risk behavior in a given choice problem. We show that by integrating a second, asymmetrically dominated choice problem in a random incentive mechanism risk behavior can be...

This doctoral thesis investigates the influence of overconfidence on the outcomes in experimental asset markets, both on the market and individual levels. Thesis consists of three parts. In the first part an instrument (test) is developed that is later used in economic experiments to measure...

Um die Arbeitsanreize und die Verteilungsgerechtigkeit des Arbeitslosengeldes II (ALG II) zu analysieren, ist eine Quantifizierung des Arbeitsleides und des Wertes der Haushaltsproduktion in verschiedenen Haushaltstypen notwendig. Da diese Größen nicht direkt beobachtbar sind, verwendet die...

This paper provides preference foundations for parametric weighting functions under rankdependent utility. This is achieved by decomposing the independence axiom of expected utility into separate meaningful properties. These conditions allow us to characterize rank-dependent utility with power...

Several experimental studies observed substantial violations of transitivity in decisions between risky lotteries over monetary outcomes. The goal of our experiment is to test whether these violations also affect the evaluation of health states. A particular feature of our experimental design is...

Several models of choice under uncertainty imply systematic violations of transitivity of preference. Our experiments explored whether people show patterns of intransitivity predicted by these models. To distinguish "true" violations from those produced by "error," a model was fit in which each...