Search

What Do Insurers Do Differently Than One Another? Managed Competition and Value Added

Atypical Work, Financial Assets, and Asset Poverty in Germany

This study investigates how atypical employment (i.e., part-time, temporary work, mini-jobs) affects workers' ability to accumulate financial assets and exposes them to asset poverty in Germany. Asset poverty occurs when household financial resources (e.g., bank deposits and stock equity) are insufficient to live at the income poverty line for three months. Previously, studies on labour market processes ...

Cancelled: 10th BCCP Research Day

Leibniz ScienceCampusBerlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) Research Day At this BCCP Research Day (formerly known as BCCP Forum), Fellows will give short pitches of their current research. Since we also want to have enough time for discussions and networking, we plan long coffee breaks between the presentation sessions as well as get-together afterwards. The event will bring together all...

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 disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices financed through debt taking. We find that ...

Ignorance, Intention and Stochastic Outcomes

In sequential interactions, both the agent’s intention and the outcome of his choice may influence the principal’s action. While outcomes are typically observable, intentions are more likely to be hidden, leaving potential wiggle room for the principal when deciding on a reciprocating action. We employ a controlled experiment to investigate how intentions and outcome affect the principal’s actions ...

The 13th Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) and supported by the Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart...

Consumption and Subjective Expectations: Empirical Evidence and Structural Estimation

Expectation Management of Policy Leaders: Evidence from COVID-19

This paper studies how the communication of political leaders affects the expectation formation of the public. Specifically, we examine the expectation management of the German government regarding COVID-19-related regulatory measures during the early phase of the pandemic. We elicit beliefs about the duration of these restrictions via a high-frequency survey of individuals, accompanied by an addi-tional ...

The Role of Physician-Patient Similarity in Diagnosis and Treatment Decisions: Evidence from Antibiotic Prescribing

Physicians in primary care provide initial diagnosis and treatment for a diverse set of patients. However, whereas patients are demographically and socio-economically heterogeneous, physicians typically come from affluent and highly-educated backgrounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between physicians and the community they serve. I investigate the role of patient-physician similarity...

Fairness in Markets and Market Experiments

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratory experiments survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We investigate how fairness in a laboratory experiment framed explicitly as a market exchange relates to preferences for fair trade products elicited before and at the end of the market experiment. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price...