Essays on Physiological and Psychological Influences of Economic Preferences

This dissertation investigates how internal states and personality traits shape the way people make economic decisions. Situated within behavioral economics, it combines incentivized laboratory experiments with structural modeling to examine three factors across three papers: hunger, intelligence, and impulsivity. A central finding across all three studies is that these factors tend to influence how consistently people choose rather than what they fundamentally prefer. The first paper finds that short-term food deprivation, contrary to common assumptions, improves decision rationality. Hungry participants showed less distorted probability assessments, fewer decision errors, and greater emotional self-regulation, while their willingness to cooperate and share remained unchanged. The second paper revisits the long-held belief that more intelligent individuals are less risk-averse, finding instead that intelligence reduces behavioral noise and improves choice consistency, without shifting underlying risk attitudes. The third paper examines impulsivity and finds no meaningful relationship between this personality trait and any formal risk preference parameter, challenging predictions from dual-process theories that link impulsivity to distorted economic judgment. Taken together, the three studies suggest that many behavioral anomalies in economic decision-making reflect the limits of cognitive processing rather than fundamentally different preferences. The dissertation contributes both empirical findings and a methodological framework for rigorously separating preference shifts from changes in choice quality, with implications for behavioral economics, decision research, and the design of policies that account for the human factors shaping economic behavior.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Year

2026

Author dc:creator

• Baumann, Lukas

Contributors dc:contributor

• Schmidt, Ulrich
• Carstensen, Kai

• Risk Preferences
• Time Preferences
• Social Preferences

Repository record source_url

https://macau.uni-kiel.de/receive/macau_mods_00008270

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:macau.uni-kiel.de:macau_mods_00008270