Experimental and empirical evidence shows that the utility an individual derives from a certain state depends on the reference state she compares it to. According to economic theory, the reference state is determined by past, present and future outcomes of either the individual herself or her...

A central understanding in experimental economics is that subjects’ decisions in the lab are independent of history. We test whether this assumption of between-experiment independence is indeed justified. We analyze experiments with an allocation decision (like a dictator or ultimatum game)...

The experiment described in this paper analyzes imitation in an individual learning context. It supplements the results obtained for imitation in evolutionary processes. The paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides a clear distinction between intentional imitation and genuine...

Public banks are often blamed to possess an unfair competitive advantage in the form of lower funding costs due to a state guarantee on their deposits. However, public and private banks tend to differ not only in their funding costs, but also in the way they deal with borrowers in financial...

We investigate to what extent genuine social preferences can explain observed other-regarding behavior. In a dictator game variant subjects can choose whether to learn about the consequences of their choice for the receiver. We find that a majority of subjects showing other-regarding behavior...

We analyze the impact of institutional and cultural factors on the supply side of open source software (OSS). OSS is a privately provided public good: it is marked by free access to the software and its source code, and is developed in a public, collaborative manner by thousands of volunteers as...

This paper analyzes the development of the German knowledge base measured by co-classifications of patents by German inventors and relate this technological development to changes in the structure of the underlying inventor networks. The central hypothesis states that technologies that become...

To enable rapid container transshipment between freight trains in modern rail-rail transshipment yards efficient computerized scheduling procedures are indispensable. This paper proposes a dynamic programming approach, which determines yard areas for gantry cranes, so that the workload is evenly...

The generation of leveled production schedules is of high importance for mixed-model assembly lines whose parts and materials are supplied just-in-time by multi-level production processes. The Output Rate Variation problem is the standard mathematical representation of this complex level...