Essays in behavioural economics

Abstract

Chapter 2 presents an abstract, game-theoretic framework that describes how behaviour could be influenced by context effects. The empirical analysis from Chapter 3 uses the SOEP to evaluate the extent to which health-conscious behaviour affects the demand for private supplementary health insurance in a cross-sectional analysis. Chapter 4 is an epistemological discussion of welfare. It is argued that decisions such as on nudging cannot be justified under welfaristic premises, so that responsibility for such decisions cannot be transferred to objective circumstances.