In this work we shall attempt an excursus across fundamentally different streams of modern interpretations of the "primitive entities" constituting the social fabrics of economic systems. Behind each specific interpretative story, there is a set of ceteris paribus assumptions and also some...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

Welfarist justifications of democracy presume that citizens have policy preferences that are responsive to pertinent information. Is this accurate? This paper addresses that question by providing a model and empirical test of how citizens' policy preferences respond to information in the arena...

This paper investigates the effects of parenting time on macroeconomic outcomes and welfare when parenting choices are determined by own childhood experience and social norms in an overlapping generations framework. Parenting time and material expenditures on children generate children's human...

We provide a game-theoretic account of endogenous intrinsic motivation within a principal-agent framework. We explore the incentives of an altruistic principal who, by exerting costly effort, can intrinsically motivate a present-biased agent to exhibit a direct preference for more far-sighted...

The creation and effects of social capital have seldom been a target for systematic analysis in orthodox economics. The purpose of the paper is to argue that in order to include social capital, along with physical and human, into economic analysis, we have to regard human preferences as...

This paper investigates environmental policy in the presence of endogenous preferences. The optimal time trajectory is achieved if and only if the consumer is perfectly time-consistent. The suboptimal trajectories do not only differ from the optimal path during the transition between two...

The default assumption of standard economics is to treat preferences as exogenously 'given', consistent with one another, 'revealed' by past choices, and context independent. There has been increased interest recently (within behavioural economics) in the impact of inconsistent or irrational...

In a model inspired by neuroscience, we show that constrained optimal perception encodes lottery rewards using an S-shaped encoding function and over-samples low-probability events. The implications of this perception strategy for behavior depend on the decision-maker's understanding of the...

Elisabeth Grewenig prepared this study while she was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2021 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of five distinct empirical essays that...