Empirical evidence has shown that people are unwilling to insure rare losses at subsidized premiums and at the same time take-up insurance for moderate risks at highly loaded premiums. This paper explores whether prospect theory, in particular diminishing sensitivity and loss aversion, can...

This thesis analyzes two different aspects Social Policy in Germany is concerned with. This relates to (1) the aging of society and (2) the shifting household composition from ‘classic’ families to single-parent households. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 we analyze the evolution of the financial...

Experiments on choice under risk typically involve multiple decisions by individual subjects. The choice of mechanism for selecting decision(s) for payoff is an essential design feature that is often driven by appeal to the isolation hypothesis or the independence axiom. We report two...

This paper investigates the relationship between market overconfidence and occurrence of stock-price bubbles. Sixty participants traded stocks in ten experimental asset markets. Markets were constructed on the basis of subjects’ overconfidence, measured in pre-experimental sessions. The most...

There is a large literature showing that willingness-to-accept (WTA) is usually much higher than willingness-to-pay (WTP) in empirical studies although they should be roughly equal according to traditional economic theory. A second stream of literature shows that people are typically ambiguity...

The present paper reports a repeated experiment on decision making under risk where subjects have to tackle the same choice problems in several rounds. We fit a simple error model and investigate how behavior changes in the course of the experiment. Our analysis complements and extends Hey...

Different family types may have a fixed flow of consumption costs, related to subsistence needs. We use a survey method in order to identify and estimate such a fixed component of spending for different families. Our method involves making direct questions about the linkup between aggregate...

Recently proposed models of risky choice imply systematic violations of transitivity of preference. Five studies explored whether people show patterns of intransitivity predicted by four descriptive models. To distinguish trueʺ violations from those produced by error,ʺ a model was fit in which...