Mehr als die Hälfte der Erwachsenen in Deutschland ist übergewichtig. Besonders oft betroffen sind Ältere, Arme und Menschen mit geringer Bildung. Ein Thema für Wirtschaftswissenschaftler? Ernährung und fehlende Bewegung sind entscheidende Faktoren für wichtige Volkskrankheiten. Für durch...

Numerous laboratory studies report on behaviors inconsistent with rational economic models. How much do these inconsistencies matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to learn from experiences? We report on a field experiment designed to...

Define the riskiness of a gamble as the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion (ARA) of an individual with constant ARA who is indifferent between taking and not taking that gamble. We characterize this index by axioms, chief among them a “duality” axiom which, roughly speaking, asserts...

An information transaction entails the purchase of information. Formally, it consists of an information structure together with a price. We develop an index of the appeal of information transactions, which is derived as a dual to the agent's preferences for information. The index of information...

Consider any investor who fears ruin facing any set of investments that satisfy no-arbitrage. Before investing, he can purchase information about the state of nature in the form of an information structure. Given his prior, information structure 'a' is more informative than information structure...

Neoclassical economic theory rules out systematic errors in consumption choice. According to the basic view, individuals know what they choose. They are able to predict how much utility an activity or a good produces for them now and in the future and they can maximize their utility. This...

This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a...

This paper has a dual purpose. First, I present a new modeling of partial naivete, and apply this to the analysis of procrastination. The decision maker is assumed to have stationary behavior and to be partially naive in the sense of perceiving that his current preferences may persist in the...

In this paper, we show that the right to determine the sequence of moves in a dynamic team tournament improves the chances of winning the contest. Because studying dynamic team tournaments - like R&D races - with interim feedback is difficult with company data, we examine decisions of highly...

In this paper, we show that the right to determine the sequence of moves in a dynamic team tournament improves the chances of winning the contest. Because studying dynamic team tournaments - like R&D races - with interim feedback is difficult with company data, we examine decisions of highly...