Policy makers increasingly use choice defaults to promote `good' causes by influencing socially relevant decisions in desirable ways, e.g., to increase pro-environmental choices or pro-social behavior in general. Such default nudges are remarkably successful when judged by their effects on the...

This paper reports evidence from a field experiment investigating households' electricity saving behavior. We motivated households' efforts to save electricity via pro-environmental incentives that did not affect people's monetary utility but targeted their environmental preferences. The results...

We study the effect of repeated opportunities to behave pro-socially on aggregate pro-social behavior in two laboratory experiments and in field data on charitable giving. In the first experiment we show that two consecutive pro-social decisions (implemented as donations to a charity) lead to...

Carbon taxes are a prominent policy instrument for decreasing the consumption of CO2-intensive goods in order to reduce the negative external effects involved in the production or consumption of such goods. A tax leads to higher consumer prices, which typically lowers consumption. However, in...

Many countries have liberalized their residential electricity markets or are considering to do so. Liberalization provides consumers with more freedom of choice but also leads to higher choice complexity as consumers face a much larger number of different electricity contracts to choose from. We...

Women are stereotyped as more risk averse than men. Empirical and experimental investigations seem to support the stereotype, yet they tackle different and often unrelated aspects. Reliable predictions on gender specific differences in risky choices are hardly possible since there is no common...

This paper reports the results of an experiment that brings together psychological measures of competence and overconfidence with laboratory economic measures of individual valuations of uncertainty. We examine the valuations of risky and ambiguous lotteries in a financial decision context. The...