This brief note rises doubts on the argument that nudging will help people to behave more rational in terms of their own preferences. This justification of soft paternalism overlooks some methodological problems of expected utility theory which are one of the roots of behavioral economics.

Behavioural economics attracted attention from environmental economists: it should help to understand why people do not respond to environmental policy measures, based on neoclassical assumptions, as predicted by theory. Moreover, understanding motives and driving forces behind pro-social,...

In New Keynesian as well as in Post Keynesian macroeconomic models, money supply is assumed to be endogenous. The reasons for the endogeneity and the role of the financial sector in the supply process, however, are seen very different. In this paper we explicitly derive the behaviour of the...

Es besteht empirische Evidenz, dass reale Spieler weitaus mehr Vertrauen und Vertrauenswürdigkeit entwickeln als es nach den Voraussagen der klassischen Spieltheorie rational ist. Das Papier skizziert den Indirekt Evolutionären Ansatz zur Erklärung der Entstehung von Vertrauen nach Güth und...

Global environmental protection is characterized as a public good. In contrast to the national level where the state is able to regulate external effects, there is a lack of supranational institutions which have enough power to force countries to reduce pollution levels. In spite of the...

The paper investigates the optimal regulation of a (software) firm which acts as a natural monopolist, who also offers a complementary good (IT services) on a competitive market. It is shown that a first-best-regulation accompanyied with an optimal taxation schedule in order to compensate the...