Environmental behavior changes over time, both within individuals and across cultures. Yet, economists, behavioral scientists, and environmentalists have a limited understanding of the drivers and dynamics of pro-social and pro-environmental behavior. This paper takes a model of endogenous...

We study how individuals’ willingness to delegate choice is affected by heterogeneity in identity between the delegee and the delegate. While it is straightforward that such heterogeneity can affect delegation for instrumental reasons, we show experimentally that divergent identity also causes...

We provide new evidence of worker-firm matching based on preferences, attitudes and personality traits using new, representative matched employer-employee data from Germany. Time-constant firm characteristics explain a significant proportion of total variance in a series of outcome variables...

We examine subsidies for health care when consumers have present-biased preferences, which lead them to underestimate the effect of today s consumption on future health. We compare immediate subsidies paid for health-conscious consumption and future subsidies rewarding a good health outcome. We...

We demonstrate that upward-looking comparisons induce "keeping up with the richer Joneses"-behavior. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the effect of reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on household...

Many studies document failures of expected utility’s key assumption, the independence axiom. Here, we show that independence can be decomposed into two distinct axioms - betweenness and homotheticity - and that these two axioms are necessary and sufficient for independence. Thus, independence...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance...

In this project we investigate experimentally the link between self-control and attitude towards paternalism in a principal-agent framework. This allows us to distinguish between models of costly self-control and models of time inconsistency, which often make identical predictions in other...