Research in the Department of the Executive Board

Strategic Behavior and Risk Management

Supervision: Georg Weizsäcker
Collaboration: Ludwig Ensthaler

This research area examines human behavior when having to make economic decisions in situations that involve strategic interactions or exogenous risk. In particular, it analyzes the role of expectations (beliefs) regarding the behavior of others and identifies systematic deviations which undermine the assumption that expectations are rationally based. A series of researches concern "social learning," i.e., situations in which economic agents can learn from the decisions of other agents. The research area also examines the trend among decision-makers to make decisions independently of each other ("narrow bracketing"). The research is based on data analyses of decision experiments and surveys as well as on the methods of decision theory and game theory.