When the public provision of private goods is partial rather than universal, public supply may be supplemented by the entry of private firms in the market for the private good. The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether partial public provision helps or hinders aggregate access to the...

Paternalism, merit goods and specific egalitarianism are concepts we sometimes meet in the literature. The thing in common is that the policy maker does not fully respect the consumer sovereignty principle and designs policies according to some other criterion than individuals' preferences....

This paper discusses Judge Guido Calabresi's use of the concept of merit goods in his book The Future of Law and Economics (2016). It addresses the following questions: (1) What does Calabresi's conceptualisation of merit good share with the main lines of arguments in the literature for...

Einleitung -- Nudge – Ökonomische Grundlagen und Definition -- Nudge in Deutschland – Die Einordnung des Konzepts und seine rechtliche Bewertung -- Rechtliche Bewertung von Nudge – Die praktische Anwendung im Verwaltungsrecht -- Schluss.

Richard Musgrave coined the terminology of merit wants and merit goods in the 1950s in the context of the theory of public finance. He pointed out that certain goods such as free school lunches or subsidies to low cost housing did not have pure public or private good characteristics. If a...

Prior studies that try to explain who gets tenure and why remain inconclusive, especially on whether non-meritocratic factors influence who becomes a professor. On the basis of career and publication data of virtually all sociologists working in German sociology departments, we test how...

Paternalism is an attempt to influence individuals' decisions for their own benefit, even if there are no third parties involved. This seems to contradict normative individualism, which provides the general orientation to our modern democracies. Soft or libertarian paternalism accepts the...

The paper deals with impulsive consumption and highlights the roles that cognitive and motivational aspects of reflexive thought (namely self-control and self-image motives, respectively) play in intertemporal decisions. While self-control inhibits individuals from consuming impulsively,...

We investigate experimentally whether the protégés' reaction to paternalism depends on the consequences of the paternalistic action to their well-being. We find that protégé punish a paternalist restricting their freedom of choice. Yet, this negative reaction is not based on principled...

We analyse attempts to implement personalised regulation in the form of sin licenses (O'Donoghue and Rabin 2003, 2005, 2007) to correct the distortion in the consumption of a harmful good when consumers suffer from varying degrees of self-control problems. We take into account the possibility...

We study career choice when competition for promotion is a contest. A more meritocratic profession always succeeds in attracting the highest ability types, whereas a profession with superior promotion benefits attracts high types only if the hazard rate of the noise in performance evaluation is...

We investigate experimentally whether the protégés' reaction to paternalism depends on the consequences of the paternalistic action to their well-being. We find that protégé punish a paternalist restricting their freedom of choice. Yet, this negative reaction is not based on principled...

Bei dem vorliegenden Text handelt es sich um eine überarbeitete Version meiner Magisterarbeit, die ich im Jahre 2011 am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) angefertigt und an der Sozialwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen eingereicht habe. Im...

Is Friedrich von Hayek in some specific, perhaps paradoxical, way a classical liberal paternalist? My answer will be an unsatisfying yes and no depending not only on my interpretation of Hayek, but also on the manifold interpretations one can give to the concepts of paternalism and classical...

In this paper we compare the properties in terms of rent extraction of Hotelling spatial competition and monopoly franchises using Dutch first price auctions, two of the most widely used tools to regulate public service provision. In a framework where the regulator can imperfectly observe costs,...

In einem ersten Hauptteil wird eine mangelnde publizistische Vielfalt der Medien als Folge zweier Marktmängel beschrieben: zum einen als Folge einer fehlenden direkten Ausschließbarkeit, die zu einer Finanzierung aus Werbeeinnahmen und damit verbundenen Vielfaltsminderungen geführt hat, zum...

Paternalism is an attempt to influence individuals’ decisions for their own benefit, even if there are no third parties involved. This seems to contradict normative individualism, which provides the general orientation to our modern democracies. Soft or libertarian paternalism accepts the...

We provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyse whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. We take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around three...

We consider a two-period model. In the first period, individuals consume two goods: one is sinful and the other is not. The sin good brings pleasure but has a detrimental effect on second period health and individuals tend to underestimate this effect. In the second period, individuals can...

We provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyse whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. We take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around three...