Publications

Obwohl der berufsschulische ERP-Einsatz in der einschlägigen Literatur seit geraumer Zeit diskutiert wird, gibt es bis heute kaum robuste empirische Untersuchungen zu dessen Wirksamkeit als Lernmittel zum Aufbau von über Bedienfertigkeiten hinausgehendem Wissen. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht diese Effekte im Rahmen von 2 Teilstudien mittels eines (quasi-)experimentellen Pre-/Posttest-Designs. In Studie 1 (n = 279 Industriekaufleute und n = 223 Einzelhandelskaufleute) zeigt die Versuchsgruppe vergleichbare Lerneffekte beim Aufbau des Geschäftsprozesswissens wie die Kontrollgruppe. In der darauf aufbauenden Studie 2 (n = 142 Industriekaufleute) wurde die ERP-Umgebung fachdidaktisch elaborierter eingebettet. Hier zeigt sich ein mittelstarker Effekt zugunsten der Versuchsgruppe (β = .224, p = .006, d = .57).

We investigate whether risk, time, environmental, and social preferences affect single-family homeowners’ investments in the energy efficiency of their house using established experimental measures and questionnaires. We find that homeowners who report to be more risk taking are more likely to have renovated their house. Pro-environmental and future-oriented renovators, i.e. renovators with lower discount factors, live in homes with higher energy efficiency. Pro-social preferences as measured in a dictator game relates positively to the energy quality of renovated houses. Controlling for the energy efficiency of houses, we further find that energy consumption as measured by heating and electricity costs is lower for future-oriented and pro-environmental individuals.

We exploit the 1997 school reform that prolonged compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years to investigate the causal effect of education on emigration intentions. Our IV estimates indicate that an additional year of schooling increases the probability of reporting the intention to emigrate by 24% points. Moreover, we provide evidence that the identified effect of education on emigration intentions does not operate through financial dissatisfaction, but rather through displeasure at a bleak political environment that better educated people are more keenly aware of.

This paper examines games with non-neutral option labels (such as “A”, “B”, “A”, “A”) and finds surprisingly invariant behaviour across games. The behaviour closely resembles the choices people make when they have to bet on one of the options in individual lotteries. An option’s ‘representativeness’ (lack of distinguishing features) and ‘reachability’ (physical centrality, salience, and valence) determine choice behaviour in both the lotteries and the highly strategic games. There is no evidence of people best-responding to others’ betting(-like) behaviour. This is in line with the idea that once people decide that strategic reasoning would not take them any further, they pick an alternative as if they were betting on one of their ‘current best-responses’. The findings explain the well-documented seeker advantage in hide-and-seek games, as well as why participants often display behaviour that could be exploited by others. On top, they help understand why in national lotteries, people also tend to bet on identical subsets of the available numbers.

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dc.contributor.author: Gonon, Philipp

Referring to historical debates and theories on vocational education and training (VET) since the 19th century and developments up to the present day, this paper considers the cultural conditions that were relevant for the emergence and legitimisation of vocational education and training and, in particular, the dual principle of apprenticeships in Germany and Switzerland. With reference to the theories of German Vocational Education Theory that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and the concept of vocation (Beruf), i.e. the merging of occupation-based work and education, as it was propagated in particular by Georg Kerschensteiner, the development and establishment of dual vocational training in Germany and Switzerland is reconstructed, in line with what became the institutional framework of apprenticeships in the two countries. It is above all the focus on education in schools through Bildung as a pedagogical concept reaching beyond what may technically be associated with skill formation for jobs, but also the understanding that VET should be given a reliable institutional framework, that were crucial for the emergence and establishment of the modern VET system in both countries.

Recent research in the U.S. links trade-induced job displacement to deaths of despair. Should we expect the same mortality response in developing countries? This paper analyzes the effect of a trade-induced negative shock to manufacturing employment on leading causes of mortality in Mexico between 1998 and 2013. I exploit cross-municipality variation in trade exposure based on differences in industry specialization before China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 to identify labor-demand shocks that are concentrated in manufacturing. I find trade-induced job loss increased mortality from diabetes, raised obesity rates, reduced physical activity, and lowered access to health insurance. These deaths were offset by declines in mortality from ischemic heart disease and chronic pulmonary disease. These findings highlight that negative employment shocks have heterogeneous impacts on mortality in developing countries, where falling incomes lead to less access to health care and nutritious food, but also reduce alcohol and tobacco use.

This paper reports an experiment designed to assess the influence of workplace arrangements on the reactions to (the absence of) control. We compare behavior in an Internet and a laboratory principal-agent game where the principal can control the agent by implementing a minimum effort requirement. Then the agent chooses an effort costly to her but beneficial to the principal. Our design captures meaningful differences between working from home and working at the office arrangements. Online subjects enjoy greater anonymity than lab subjects, they interact in a less constrained environment than the laboratory, and there is a larger physically-oriented social distance between them. Control is significantly more effective online than in the laboratory. Positive reactions to the principal’s choice not to control are observed in both treatments, but they are significantly weaker online than in the laboratory. Principals often choose the highest control level, which maximizes their earnings.

In many situations, people can lie strategically for their own benefit. Since individuals differ with respect to their willingness to lie, the credibility of statements will crucially depend on who self-selects into such cheap-talk situations. We study this process in a two-stage political competition setting. At the entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become their party’s candidate in an election. At the election stage, the nominated candidates campaign by making promises to voters. Confirming the model’s key prediction, we find in our experiment that dishonest people over-proportionally self-select into the political race and thereby lower voters’ welfare.

The majority consensus in the empirical literature is that probability weighting functions are typically inverse-S shaped, that is, people tend to overweight small and underweight large probabilities. A separate stream of literature has reported event-splitting effects (also called violations of coalescing) and shown that they can explain violations of expected utility. This leads to the questions whether (1) the observed shape of weighting functions is a mere consequence of the coalesced presentation and, more generally, whether (2) preference elicitation should rely on presenting lotteries in a canonical split form instead of the commonly used coalesced form. We analyze data from a binary choice experiment where all lottery pairs are presented in both split and coalesced forms. Our results show that the presentation in a split form leads to a better fit of expected utility theory and to probability weighting functions that are closer to linear. We thus provide some evidence that the extent of probability weighting is not an ingrained feature, but rather a result of processing difficulties.

Whether people seek or avoid risks on gambling, insurance, asset, or labor markets crucially depends on the skewness of the underlying probability distribution. In fact, people typically seek positively skewed risks and avoid negatively skewed risks. We show that salience theory of choice under risk can explain this preference for positive skewness, because unlikely, but outstanding payoffs attract attention. In contrast to alternative models, however, salience theory predicts that choices under risk not only depend on the absolute skewness of the available options, but also on how skewed these options appear to be relative to each other. We exploit this fact to derive novel, experimentally testable predictions that are unique to the salience model and that we find support for in two laboratory experiments. We thereby argue that skewness preferences—typically attributed to cumulative prospect theory—are more naturally accommodated by salience theory.

Teaching approaches have been shown to be an important aspect of teaching in school or higher education. Although differing approaches to teaching may play a role in the outcome of professional trainings, they have not yet been further studied in this context. It is first necessary to determine whether the existing approaches to teaching construct can be transferred to the context of professional training and how approaches to teaching can be operationalized for future studies. For a multi-perspective view, we conducted 45 interviews with trainers, human resource development practitioners and trainees. The interviews were analyzed by qualitative content analysis. Our results show that the construct can be transferred to professional training. However, to apply the approaches to teaching construct to professional training, some of the underlying categories must be modified. Furthermore, we discuss the need to include new aspects, such as the category of transfer. Implications for further research are presented, including the development of a measurement instrument based on the results.

We study how reciprocity affects the extent to which a chair can exploit her control over an agenda if a committee votes sequentially on a known series of binary proposals. We show in a parsimonious laboratory experiment that committee members form vote trading coalitions favoring early proposals not only when the sequence of proposals is exogenously given, but also when a chair controls the sequence of proposals. Vote trading occurs even though chairs manipulate the agenda in their favor. Punishment for chairs exploiting agenda control is weak as chairs reciprocate support by others more frequently than nonchairs.

The management of non-financial risks such as ESG-, sustainability- and compliance risks poses a great challenge for companies. In contrast to financial risks the information on non-financial risks is very limited. This renders management quite difficult. Companies incurred big losses due to non-financial risks in recent years. Corporate governance of these risks raises many unresolved questions. This paper delineates potential answers and hypotheses about the impact of information quality. Practitioners complain about the lack of support from academia. A cooperation of practitioners and academics to resolve these questions presents attractive research fields for academia. Thus, this paper also presents a research agenda for academia.

We ask three questions. First, do election systems differ in how they translate physical attractiveness of candidates into electoral success? Second, do political parties strategically exploit the “beauty premium” when deciding on which candidates to nominate, and, third, do elected MPs use their beauty premium to reap some independence from their party? Using the German election system that combines first-past-the-post election with party-list proportional representation, our results show that plurality elections provide more scope for translating physical attractiveness into electoral success than proportional representation. Whether political parties strategically use the beauty premium to optimize their electoral objectives is less clear. Physically attractive MPs, however, allow themselves to dissent more often, i.e. they vote more often against the party line than their less attractive peers.