Behavioral Foundations of Search, Matching, Teamwork, and Project Evaluation: Preferences and Constraints in Decision-Making

Understanding how people make decisions is key for designing economic policies. This dissertation offers new insights into the behavioral foundations of consumer choice, teamwork, and entrepreneurial finance by illustrating the role of preferences and constraints in decision-making. I investigate what makes consumers search inefficiently, why people match with whom, when teams collaborate effectively, and what prevents female entrepreneurs from succeeding. I use experimental techniques to study these policy-relevant questions that have been difficult to answer using traditional econometric strategies. Through studying preferences and constraints in decision-making, I identify concrete mechanisms that can be turned into solutions to practical problems. More broadly, these generalizable mechanisms provide insights into the behavioral foundations of different stages of innovation processes, science, and entrepreneurship.

Publications

• Klimm, Felix; Kocher, Martin G.; Opitz, Timm; Schudy, Simeon Andreas (2023). Time Pressure and Regret in Sequential Search, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 206, 406-424, DOI.
• Bartoš, Vojtěch; Castro, Silvia; Czura, Kristina; Opitz, Timm (2023). Gendered Access to Finance: The Role of Team Formation, Idea Quality, and Implementation Constraints in Business Evaluations, CESifo Working Paper, 10719, Link.
• Opitz, Timm; Schwaiger, Christoph (2022). Everyone Likes to Be Liked: Experimental Evidence from Matching Markets, CRC TRR 190 Discussion Paper, No. 366, Link.