Teaching

Master programme in Behavioural Economics

• Behavioural Economics is a specialisation within the MSc Economics and Business programme

  • Link to website with general information about the programme for prospective students

  • Link to various relevant rules and regulations

Bachelor Major in Behavioural & Health Economics

• Behavioural & Health Economics is a major within the International Bachelor Economics and Business (IBEB) programme

Link to website with general information about the major for prospective students

Behavioural Economics

• Third year Bachelor course

• Part of the core courses of the IBEB major in Behavioural and Health Economics

Seminar Applied Behavioural Economics

• Seminar for Master students with specialisation in Behavioural Economics

Supervision of theses

• Typical topics include

  • Social preferences

People are not purely selfish. They can be generous or jealous, inequality averse or spiteful, seek to reward kindness and punish unkindness. In other words, the welfare of others can affect an individual's utility both positively and negatively, and to what extent that is the case may depend on the context. How can these attitudes towards the welfare of others be modelled and measured? Various experiments (dictator games, ultimatum games, public goods games, trust games, punishments and rewards, distributions made as social planner or behind a veil of ignorance, etc.) can be used to study these kind of preferences in more detail.

• Comparability of preferences

How can risk or social preferences be compared? How can we compare the risk aversion of two individuals who act according to different subjective probabilities? Can we say which of two individuals is choosing more just distributions of money when they have different ideas about what a "just" distribution even is?

• Testing and measuring rationality

"[Homo sapiens] is often downright stupid; and even when intelligent, he may be tired or hungry or distracted or cross or drunk or stoned, unable to think under pressure, able to think only under pressure, or guided more by his emotions than his brains." --Robert Aumann, 1985

Using demand data, either from consumer panel data or induced budget experiments, one can test if choices are consistent with utility maximisation. If they are not, which is typically the case, one can compute measures for the extent of the deviation. One can also modify the classical utility maximisation hypothesis to test if deviations are of a particular kind or if they are simply due to random mistakes. This also relates to collective household decision making: How can we test if household behaviour that looks irrational is in fact the result of intra-household bargaining between rational individuals?

• Relationship of risk, social, and time preferences

Risk preferences are preferences over distributions of utility in different states that can occur. Social preferences are preferences over distributions of utility for different individuals. Time preferences are preferences over distributions of utility at different points in time. The future is uncertain, redistribution of income can be supported as an insurance against falling on hard times, and being empathetic towards other individuals could be related to empathy for one's future self. These kinds of preferences can therefore be analysed with similar tools, and they could be related with each other in various different ways. Both theoretical and experimental work is required to find out how exactly these preferences are connected.

• I used to teach various courses at Prof. Dr. W. Leininger's Chair of Microeconomic Theory:

  • Economics of information

  • Game theory / bargaining theory

  • Industrial organisation

  • Economic theory seminar

• I used to teach as a student teaching assistant at Prof. Dr. F. Bolle's Chair of Economic Theory (Microeconomics):

  • Tutorials accompanying the microeconomics lecture

  • Preparation course for microeconomics exam