Predicting Food Waste from Dynamic Inconsistency (with Alexander Danzer), Working Paper, 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), Working Paper, 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.
Stories or Statistics? How Communication Shapes Public Support for Water Protection in Germany , with Andreas Pondorfer, funding application
Measuring and Reducing Food Waste in Public Food Service: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment, with Alexander Danzer and Verbraucherzentrale NRW, funding application
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
Do People Support Information Campaigns about Inequality? (with Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Lergetporer and Clara Pache), Working Paper, access here
We study beliefs about whether information campaigns can shift public support for redistribution in a survey with more than 3,000 respondents. We randomly provide respondents with evidence from a meta-study about the share of information interventions that do not significantly affect redistributive preferences. This information strongly changes respondents’ beliefs about the effectiveness of such campaigns. Descriptively, respondents who are more skeptical about the effectiveness of information campaigns are also less supportive of disseminating such information. However, we find no causal effect of experimentally shifting these beliefs on support for government provision of inequality-related information to the public, which is generally high. We analyze open-ended responses to study why experimen- tally shifting beliefs about the effectiveness of information campaigns does not affect support for information dissemination.
Are Gender Norms Shaped by Who Earns More? (with Hanna Brosch, Elisabeth Grewenig, Philipp Lergetporer and Katharina Werner), Working Paper, access here
Gender norms about parental labor supply are central to explaining persistent gender inequalities in the labor market, 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 whether respondents recommend that the mother (father) stay home with the child while the father (mother) works full-time. Without specifying earnings, 90% recommend that the mother stay home. This share remains high when we specify that the mother earns less (93%). When she earns more, the share 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.
Expertise and Prediction Accuracy (with Elisabeth Grewenig, Klaus Gründler, Philipp Lergetporer, Niklas Potrafke and Katharina Werner), Working Paper, 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.
Information Spillovers in the Elicitation of Multidimensional Beliefs (with Philipp Lergetporer, Thomas Rittmannsberger and Katharina Werner), Working Paper, access here
We study beliefs about whether information campaigns can shift public support for redistribution in a survey with more than 3,000 respondents. We randomly provide respondents with evidence from a meta-study about the share of information interventions that do not significantly affect redistributive preferences. This information strongly changes respondents’ beliefs about the effectiveness of such campaigns. Descriptively, respondents who are more skeptical about the effectiveness of information campaigns are also less supportive of disseminating such information. However, we find no causal effect of experimentally shifting these beliefs on support for government provision of inequality-related information to the public, which is generally high. We analyze open-ended responses to study why experimentally shifting beliefs about the effectiveness of information campaigns does not affect support for information dissemination.
The E-Word – On the Public Acceptance of Experiments (with Mira Fischer, Elisabeth Grewenig, Philipp Lergetporer and Katharina Werner), Economics Letters, access here.
Randomized experiments are often viewed as the “gold standard” of scientific evidence, but people's skepticism towards experiments has compromised their viability in the past. We study preferences for experimental policy evaluations in a representative survey in Germany (N > 1,900). We find that a majority of 75 % supports the idea of small-scale evaluations of policies before enacting them at a large scale. Experimentally varying whether the evaluations are explicitly described as “experiments” has a precisely estimated overall zero effect on public support. Our results indicate political leeway for experimental policy evaluation, a practice that is still uncommon in Germany.
Electoral Cycles, Crisis Policy, and Behavioral Compliance: Evidence from German Federalism (with Alexander Danzer and Matthias Holzmann), draft to be published soon
Governments facing large-scale crises must balance public welfare objectives against electoral incentives. We study how electoral incentives shape crisis policy and estimate the effectiveness of policy stringency 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 before broader vaccine access — when voters demanded decisive action — but to looser measures once pandemic fatigue set in and public support for restrictions declined. This sign reversal points to an important source of heterogeneity in the relationship between electoral incentives and containment policy over the pandemic lifecycle. In periods with a strong first stage, stricter policy significantly changed economic behavior in both regulated and unregulated domains, reducing errands and grocery shopping while increasing home childcare and remote work. The response of grocery shopping suggests that containment policy works substantially through voluntary behavioral adjustment rather than mechanical compliance alone. Overall, our results show that electoral incentives can shape crisis regulation and that such politically induced policy variation can affect both mandated and voluntary behavioral responses.
Policy Making in the Tension Between Scientific Evidence and Public Opinion (with Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Lergetporer and Clara Pache), design phase
Social Norms toward Politicians, with Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Lergetporer und Clara Pache, funding application