Predicting Food Waste from Dynamic Inconsistency (with Alexander Danzer), Revise&Resubmit at Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, access latest version here
Household food waste imposes substantial economic and environmental costs, yet its behavioral determinants remain imperfectly understood. Because food consumption unfolds over multiple stages, it creates scope for dynamically inconsistent choices that may turn good intentions into waste. We investigate this relationship using a nationally representative survey from Germany that combines targeted measures of food purchasing, consumption, and waste with individual present-bias parameters elicited from monetary intertemporal trade-off questions. More present-biased individuals waste significantly more food: a 10% increase in dynamic inconsistency is associated with roughly 2% more waste. This relationship is robust across specifications, replicated using a self-reported procrastination proxy, and stable several weeks later in a second survey wave. We also identify and empirically validate the mechanism linking present bias to food waste: dynamically inconsistent individuals are more likely to deviate from their own consumption intentions, and these deviations are strongly predictive of food waste. Our findings identify present bias as a systematic and previously overlooked driver of avoidable household food waste, suggesting that food policies need to address behavior along the full consumption chain.
Present Bias over Food Choices: Field Experimental Evidence (with Alexander Danzer), revising, access here
This paper investigates time inconsistencies in food consumption based on a field experiment at a college canteen where participants repeatedly select and consume lunch menus. The design features a convex non-monetary budget in a natural environment and satisfies the consume-on-receipt assumption. Leveraging 3,666 choices of different food healthiness, we find no time inconsistency at the meal level. Estimates at the dish level reveal that consumers balance healthiness between food categories. Individuals who exert self-control take up a commitment device as soon as available, while non-committers are present-biased.
How Communication Shapes Public Support for Water Protection in Germany
When the Headline Hits Home: Perceived Risk of Military Conflict and Preferences for Defense (with Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Lergetporer and Clara Pache), draft in preparation
Beliefs about the Effectiveness of Information and Preferences for Its Dissemination: Evidence from Redistribution Preferences (with Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Lergetporer and Clara Pache), draft in preparation
Are Gender Norms Shaped by Who Earns More? (with Hanna Brosch, Elisabeth Grewenig, Philipp Lergetporer and Katharina Werner), draft
Gender norms about parental labor supply are central to persistent gender inequality, yet their causal determinants remain poorly understood. We examine whether people's gender attitudes are driven by mothers' and fathers' earnings, which may shape views about the efficient allocation of paid work and care. In a large-scale representative vignette experiment in Germany (N > 10,000), we randomly vary pre-childbirth earnings and measure support for the norm that mothers should stay home while fathers work full-time. Without specifying earnings, support is very high (90%) and remains so when the mother earns less (93%). When she earns more, support drops sharply to 47%, yet nearly half of respondents still recommend that the mother stay home. This asymmetric response rejects a purely income-based explanation of gender norms. Thus, economic circumstances shape gender attitudes, but deeply rooted norms persist even when they conflict with financial incentives.
Social Norms toward Politicians, with Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Lergetporer und Clara Pache (funding application)
Information Spillovers in the Elicitation of Multidimensional Beliefs (with Philipp Lergetporer, Thomas Rittmannsberger and Katharina Werner), under review, access here
We study information-spillover effects in the elicitation of multidimensional beliefs using a representative survey of the German voting-age population. Respondents estimated government-spending levels across several domains (e.g., education, defense, social security), with randomized exposure to different informational anchors in one domain. Anchors significantly influence elicited beliefs in related domains and can also shift respondents’ policy preferences. While the anchors change absolute estimates, perceived government-spending rankings remain stable.
Expertise and Prediction Accuracy (with Elisabeth Grewenig, Klaus Gründler, Philipp Lergetporer, Niklas Potrafke and Katharina Werner), under review, access here
Public support for policy interventions depends on citizens’ beliefs about their likely effects. We examine how individuals form such beliefs by studying their predictions of experimental outcomes in a policy-relevant setting, and why their predictions differ from expert benchmarks. We elicit forecasts from 127 professional economists and a representative sample of 6,200 German households about a large-scale behavioral experiment on education policy (N = 3,133). Non-experts predict both average outcomes and treatment effects far less accurately than experts. Prediction accuracy improves with calibrated priors, self-reported effort, and the use of structured reasoning, but remains well below expert levels. We show that scalable design features, including the provision of well-calibrated numerical anchors and monetary incentives to rise effort, improve non-expert predictions, with effects comparable in magnitude to tertiary education or structured reasoning. Our findings have important implications for bridging the `expertise gap' in public discourse.
The E-Word – On the Public Acceptance of Experiments (with Mira Fischer, Elisabeth Grewenig, Philipp Lergetporer and Katharina Werner), Economics Letters, access here.
Electoral Cycles, Crisis Policy, and Behavioral Compliance: Evidence from German Federalism (with Alexander Danzer and Matthias Holzmann), draft
Governments facing large-scale crises must balance public welfare objectives against electoral incentives. We study both the political distortion of crisis policy and its effectiveness in changing economic behavior, exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany as a natural experiment in decentralized crisis governance. Using quasi-exogenous variation from pre-determined state election cycles as an instrument for policy stringency, we document a dynamic reversal in the political economy of containment policy: closer elections led to stricter measures in the pre-vaccine period — when voters demanded decisive action — but to looser measures once pandemic fatigue set in and public support for restrictions declined. This sign reversal in the first stage reconciles contradictory findings in the cross-country literature and reflects an endogenous shift in voter preferences over the pandemic lifecycle. In the pre-vaccine and early post-vaccine periods, where the instrument is strong (first-stage F-statistics of 25--177), stricter policy significantly reduced errands, increased home childcare, and increased remote work. Notably, grocery shopping — an unregulated domain — responds as strongly as regulated outcomes, indicating that containment policy works substantially through voluntary behavioral adjustment rather than mechanical compliance. In the late pandemic, the first stage collapses and behavioral effects disappear, consistent with the genuine depoliticization of pandemic policy once vaccination was universal. IV estimates systematically exceed OLS estimates, suggesting that election-responsive states also harbor more behaviorally compliant populations, suggesting that democratic accountability need not undermine policy effectiveness in crisis settings when electoral incentives and public welfare objectives are aligned.
Policy Making in the Tension Between Scientific Evidence and Public Opinion (with Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Lergetporer and Clara Pache), design phase