Suchergebnisse

Wie Personalleiter und Geschäftsführer (HR-Manager) in deutschen Unternehmen für die Verwendung von Anreizsystemen wie Zielvereinbarungen und ergebnisorientierter Vergütung sensibilisiert werden können, wird in dieser verhaltensökonomischen Studie untersucht. Dabei wird überprüft, inwieweit das Interesse der Experten durch gegebene Informationen über den Verbreitungsgrad von Zielvereinbarungen und ergebnisorientierter Vergütung und über potenzielle produktivitätssteigernde Effekte geweckt werden kann. Tatsächlich äußerten diejenigen befragten HR-Manager ein stärkeres Interesse für Zielvereinbarungen und ergebnisorientierte Vergütung, die eine Information über den Verbreitungsgrad dieser Anreizgestaltung in Deutschland bekommen haben, im Vergleich zu HR-Managern einer Kontrollgruppe ohne diese Information. Außerdem konnte in der Studie ein konsistentes Antwortverhalten zwischen Aussagen über geplante Aktivitäten beim Leistungsmanagement und Aussagen über die tatsächliche Umsetzung ein Jahr später gezeigt werden.

Socio-economic performance differs not only across countries but within countries too and can persist even after religion, language, and formal institutions are long shared. One interpretation of these disparities is that successful regions are characterized by higher levels of trust, and, more generally, of cooperation. Here we study a classic case of within-country disparities, the Italian North-South divide, to find out whether people exhibit geographically distinct abilities to cooperate independently of many other factors and whence these differences emerge. Through an experiment in four Italian cities, we study the behavior of a sample of the general population toward trust and contributions to the common good. We find that trust and contributions vary in unison, and diminish moving from North to South. This regional gap cannot be attributed to payoffs from cooperation or to institutions, formal or informal, that may vary across Italy, as the experimental methodology silences their impact. The gap is also independent of risk and other-regarding preferences which we measure experimentally, suggesting that the lower ability to cooperate we find in the South is not due to individual \moral" flaws. The gap could originate from emergent collective properties, such as different social norms and the expectations they engender. The absence of convergence in behavior during the last 150 years, since Italy was unified, further suggests that these norms can persist overtime. Using a millennium-long dataset, we explore whether the quality of past political institutions and the frequency of wars could explain the emergence of these differences in norms.

In modern economics, preferences are the unmoved movers of economic and social behavior. They are taken as given such that all social phenomena need to be explained by changes in beliefs or constraints. The assumption of given preferences constitutes however merely a convenient assumption that is not supported by evidence. Here, we examine the impact of radiation fallout after the nuclear catastrophe on the preferences and beliefs of the Ukrainian population. As the geographical distribution of radiation is essentially randomly determined by local and regional weather conditions, the radiation fallout after the catastrophe in Chernobyl constitutes a natural experiment. We find that people who were subjects to higher radiation after the catastrophe display stronger risk aversion and a higher discounting of future returns. They save less, are much less inclined to support democratic political institutions and market economies, and they engage less in political and civic activities. Because we exclude the people in the vicinity of Chernobyl from our sample, the radiation fallout "consumed" by our sample population is very low – comparable to the exposure of an average individual during one year in a non-contaminated environment. It is therefore highly unlikely that the direct health consequences of radiation fall out affect people's economic and political preferences. It rather seems that the impact is purely psychologically mediated and due to the pervasive uncertainty or fear stemming from the imagined future consequences associated with physically unnoticeable and unseizable radiation fall-out.

This paper investigates the influence of political regimes on personality, using the separation of Germany into the socialist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. We establish significant differences between former GDR and FRG residents regarding important attributes of personality (particularly neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, and the locus of control). To understand the influence of the GDR's political regime on personality, we test an important channel by exploiting regional variation in the number of unofficial state-security collaborators across East German counties. Our results indicate that local surveillance intensity is an important determinant of the personality of former GDR citizens indeed. The observed significant differences in personality imply that former citizens of the GDR have economic prospects very different from former FRG citizens and help to understand behavioral differences established in the prior literature.

Economic models of climate policy (or policies to combat other environmental problems) typically neglect psychological adaptation to changing life circumstances. People may adapt or become more sensitive, to different degrees, to a deteriorated environment. The present paper addresses these issues in a simple model of tax policy to combat climate change and elaborates on the consequences for optimal climate policies. Furthermore, it argues from a normative point of view that psychological adaptation needs to be taken into account by a pure welfarist government, which aims at internalizing an intertemporal externality.

We use a set of experiments to study the effects of forced military service for a rebel group on social capital. We examine the case of Northern Uganda, where recruits did not self-select nor were systematically screened by rebels. We find that individual cooperativeness robustly increases with length of soldiering, especially among those who soldiered during early age. Parents of ex-soldiers are aware of the behavioral difference: they trust ex-soldiers more and expect them to be more trustworthy. These results suggest that the impact of child soldiering on social capital, in contrast to human capital, is not necessarily detrimental.

People rely on their experiences when making important decisions. In making these decisions, individuals may be significantly influenced by the timing of their experiences. Using administrative data, we study whether the order in which students are assigned courses affects the choice of college major. We use a natural experiment at the United States Military Academy in which students are randomly assigned to certain courses either during or after the semester in which they are required to select their college major. We find that when students are assigned to a course in the same semester as they select a major, they are over 100 percent more likely to choose a major that corresponds to that course. Despite low switching costs, approximately half of the effect persists through graduation. Our results demonstrate that the timing of when students are assigned courses has a large and persistent effect on college major choice. We explore several potential mechanisms for these results and find that students' initial major choice best fits a framework we develop that incorporates salience and availability. Furthermore, our results suggest that once students select a major, they are less likely to switch majors than the standard model of economic choice predicts. Instead, students' decision to remain in a major is more consistent with status quo bias.

Die deliberative Demokratie setzt die Marktwirtschaft als ein System des wirtschaftlichen Wettbewerbs voraus. Dies kann anhand des Popperschen Konzepts einer Offenen Gesellschaft mit Piecemeal Engineering nachgewiesen werden. Denn die Kohärenz einer Offenen Gesellschaft setzt bei endogen beeinflussten Präferenzen voraus, dass diese Präferenzen adaptiv sind. Ohne Marktwirtschaft würden adaptive Präferenzen jedoch zu gesellschaftlicher Erstarrung führen. - Andererseits setzt die Legitimierung der Marktwirtschaft auch die deliberative Demokratie voraus. Denn die interpersonellen Einflüsse auf Präferenzen und Werte bedürfen zu ihrer Legitimierung des Wettbwerbs dieser Einflüsse, den es nur im Rahmen einer demokratisch strukturierten Öffentlichkeit gibt. Die Kohärenz eines solchen Systems wird gestützt durch die Tatsache, dass man interpersonelle Präferenzeinflüsse oft in Analogie zu adaptiven Präferenzen sehen kann. Das gilt insbesondere für das universelle Phänomen der Nachahmung.

In der Regel wird in der etablierten wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Lehre angenommen, dass der Mensch ein Homo oeconomicus ist: rational handelnd und auf materielle Gewinne ausgerichtet. Aber wird das Verhalten der Menschen durch dieses Bild richtig abgebildet? Handeln sie rational, oder wird das Verhalten vor allem durch Emotionen und Erfahrungen gesteuert? Georg Weizsäcker, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, unterstreicht, dass den Ökonomen diese Vorstellung eines Idealbildes vollkommen vertraut und auch sehr nützlich ist. Sie beschäftigen sich täglich mit dem sogenannten Homo oeconomicus, der ein solches Idealbild für die Entscheidungen in den ökonomischen Modellen sei. Aber gerade unter den Verhaltensökonomen habe der Homo oeconomicus einen besonders schlechten Ruf. Sie nutzen ihn als Referenzpunkt und fokussieren ihre Forschung darauf, diesen Referenzpunkt als unrealistisch darzustellen. Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Idealbild sei aber sinnvoll. Erst wenn man umfassend nachweisen könne, dass der Homo oeconomicus ein Phänomen nicht hervorbringen kann, wisse man, dass die ihm zugrunde liegenden Annahmen zu verwerfen seien. Dadurch lerne man viel über die echten menschlichen Entscheidungen. Allerdings betont Georg Weizsäcker auch, dass die Maxime der vernünftigen Handlung gerade in schwierigen Zeiten wichtig sei. Nach Ansicht von Martin G. Kocher, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, ist die Verhaltensökonomik nicht nur der Türöffner zu einer neuen ökonomischen Interdisziplinarität, sondern hat auch mit dazu beigetragen, die Wirtschaftswissenschaft von einer stark theoretisch geprägten Wissenschaft zu einer stark empirisch bestimmten Wissenschaft umzubauen. Felix Gelhaar, Universität zu Kiel, und Simon Bartke, Institut für Weltwirtschaft, Kiel, weisen darauf hin, dass Verhaltensänderungen langfristig nur durch Veränderungen der Präferenzen zu erreichen sind. Es sei daher erforderlich, Einfluss auf die Kultur und gesellschaftlichen Normen, z.B. durch eine langfrist

The complexity of standard medical treatment for heart failure is growing, and such therapy typically involves 5 or more different medications. Given these pressures, there is increasing interest in harnessing cardiovascular biomarkers for clinical application to more effectively guide diagnosis, risk stratification, and therapy. It may be possible to realize an era of personalized medicine for heart failure treatment in which therapy is optimized and costs are controlled. The direct mechanistic coupling of biologic processes and therapies achieved in cancer treatment remains elusive in heart failure. Recent clinical trials and meta-analyses of biomarkers in heart failure have produced conflicting evidence. In this article, which comprises a summary of discussions from the Global Cardiovascular Clinical Trialists Forum held in Paris, France, we offer a brief overview of the background and rationale for biomarker testing in heart failure, describe opportunities and challenges from a regulatory perspective, and summarize current positions from government agencies in the United States and European Union.

Contrastamos empíricamente la hipótesis Boserup para las regiones de la UE. Relacionamos la orientación productiva agraria dominante en cada región (arado, azada y ganadería) con indicadores de igualdad de género, como la participación femenina en cargos directivos, en estudios primarios, en estudios superiores, en el mercado laboral y el salario medio por hora. Usando un modelo Probit encontramos que, consistentemente con la hipótesis, existe una relación negativa entre los indicadores y la agricultura de arado. Adicionalmente, probamos que las regiones orientadas a la ganadería también generan valores de género menos igualitarios que las regiones orientadas a la agricultura de azada. ; We empirically contrast the Boserup hypothesis for the regions of the European Union. We relate the dominant productive orientation in each region (plough, hoe, animal) with indicators of gender equality: female participation in management positions, in primary education, in higher education, in the labor market and the average hourly wage. Using a Probit model we find that, consistently with the hypothesis, there is a negative relationship between indicators and plough agriculture. Additionally, we prove that livestock-oriented regions also generate less egalitarian gender values than hoe-oriented regions.

The theory that we shall seek to elaborate here puts considerable emphasis on the importance of big-time corruption in reducing funding for service delivery, the value of bureaucracy as a means of delivering public services, and the level of politicization of the public bureaucracy. This paper seeks to fill a gap in the current literature by examining different aspects of the benefits of openness and transparency in tackling corruption in the public sector, the bureaucratization of service tasks, and the failure of bureaucratic systems in delivering public services. In sum, the results of the current paper provide useful insights on the context and causes of corruption, incentives to assure efficiency within the public bureaucracy, and the organizational limits of public bureaucracy.