Topic Consumers

How Consumers Trade Off Supply Security and Green Electricity: Evidence from Germany and Great Britain

The expansion of renewable energies requires infrastructure investments to at least maintain the stability of electricity grids. Using survey data from residential consumers in Germany and Great Britain, we infer in pecuniary terms the extent to which people are prepared to reward the presence of renewable resources in electricity production and how they trade off this change in the fuel mix against ...

The Effect of Social Comparison on Debt Taking: Experimental Evidence

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we perform a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices that can be financed through debt taking. We find that having to announce one's ...

Do Demographics Prevent Consumption Aggregates from Reflecting Micro-Level Preferences?

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate preference parameters of a representative consumer, for use in policy evaluation. Focusing on dynamic models with time-separable preferences, we show that aggregation holds if, and only if, momentary utility functions fall in the Identical-Shape Harmonic Absolute-Risk Aversion (ISHARA) utility class, ...

Net Neutrality and CDN Intermediation

We analyze competition between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) where consumers demand heterogeneous content within two Quality-of-Service (QoS) regimes, Net Neutrality and Paid Prioritization, and show that paid prioritization increases the static efficiency compared to a neutral network. We also consider paid prioritization intermediated by Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). While the use of CDNs ...

All-Pay Competition with Captive Consumers

We study a game in which two firms compete in quality to serve a market consisting of consumers with different initial consideration sets. If both firms invest below a certain quality threshold, they only compete for those consumers already aware of their existence. Above this threshold, a firm is visible to all and the highest quality attracts all consumers. In equilibrium, firms do not choose their ...

Monetary Policy Can Have Heterogeneous Effects on the Investment Behavior of Women and Men

The ultra-loose monetary policy of recent years has raised concerns that the low interest rate environment may overly benefit households with specific demographic and financial characteristics. In this context, monetary policy can be a potential driver of gender wealth inequality, since women are known to be more risk averse, less financially literate, and to participate less in the financial markets ...

Willingness to Take Risk: The Role of Risk Conception and Optimism

We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of personality, and that it predicts real-life risk taking. The general risk question captures this disposition ...

Social sustainability labels: promises and reality in the example of Fairtrade-coffee

By Pio Baake, Jana Friedrichsen, and Helene Naegele Fairtrade certification is intended to improve both the income and living conditions of producers, thereby creating more fairness in international trade. However, theoretical considerations and empirical studies show that this goal is only achieved to a limited extent, at least for coffee: Faitrade certification leads at best to small increases in ...

Airbnb and Rental Prices: Evidence from Berlin

Retrospective evaluation support study: the Guidelines on Regional State Aid for 2014-2020

In January 2019, the European Commission (“Commission”) launched the evaluation of its State aid rules that were adopted as part of the State aid Modernisation. The evaluation aims to verify if the rules delivered the desired results to European citizens and businesses at a minimum cost and if they are still fit for purpose. Within this process, the Commission entrusted a consortium of...