Establishing causal relationships is a core aspect of empirical economics. Borrowing ideas from the medical sciences, we propose tentative guidelines for reliable causal inferences that cover aspects related to both the study itself and its fit with the existing background knowledge. Moreover,...

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (2011) - with respect to (a) their within-subject stability over time...

Many environment related public goods require investment of time or effort rather than simply money. Yet, most experimental studies on public good games focus on a distribution of money. In the present paper, we report results from an experiment (N=181) comparing an effort based public goods...

Abstracting from decision costs and potential self-control problems, additional choice options commonly are believed to make the decision maker better off. However, according to the questionnaire data reported in this paper, there is at least one more exception to this basic tenet of economics...

This paper considers the problem of private provision of intertemporal public goods with stock effects and shows how the deposit based solution proposed in Gerber and Wichardt (2009) can be modified to apply to this case

This paper discusses the behavioural e ffects of cognitive dissonance in conjunction with cooperative social norms and highlights their relevance for the interpretation of (non)cooperative behaviour in economic lab experiments. In particular, it is argued that, if subjects are used to...

That individual identity influences economic decision making was convincingly argued by Akerlof and Kranton (2000, 2004). However, as individual identity will commonly be based on the social affiliation with different groups, conflicting interests also concerning identity may arise. This paper...

This paper proposes a conceptual model of decision-making tying specific preferences to broader individual goals. In particular, the model considers two hierarchically ordered types of goals: Terminal goals, which represent fundamental objectives (e.g., health, social connection, etc.), and...