Kilian Bizer

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen | GAUG · Department of Economics

While an increasing number of studies postulate that vocational education and training (VET) activities have a positive impact on the innovative capacity of training companies, empirical evidence on the topic remains contradictory. This study exploits establishment data from a representative survey of German companies to estimate the relationship b...

Zusammenfassung Die Digitalisierung von Unternehmen und der Wissenstransfer (WT) zwischen akademischen und nichtakademischen Akteuren sind zentral für regionale Innovationsstrategien. Dennoch ist weder klar, wie der WT zur Digitalisierung beitragen kann, noch wie digitale Arbeitsweisen den WT unterstützen können. Um beide Fragestellungen näher zu b...

Notwithstanding a recent upsurge in interest in knowledge intermediaries and their roles in innovation support systems, we know little about the interplay between the activities of academia-driven intermediaries and their publicly financed counterparts. Building on a combination of principles derived from the resource-based theory and entrepreneuri...

Kooperativer Innovationstransfer zwischen Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ist eine wichtige Determinante regionaler Innovations- und Entwicklungskapazitäten. Strategische Partnerschaften zwischen Hochschulen, Unternehmen und Akteuren aus Politik und Verwaltung stellen in diesem Kontext einen ebenso anspruchsvollen wie effektiven Kanal der...

Zusammenfassung Die deutsche Forschungs- und Innovationspolitik fokussiert stark auf Lernen und Innovieren nach dem Prinzip „Science-Technology-Innovation“ (STI). Dies übersieht, dass gerade in Deutschland viele kleine und mittlere Unternehmen (KMU) in der Lage sind, in einem anderen Modus zu innovieren: mit „Learning by doing-Using-Interacting“ (D...

In markets for expert services, consumers suffer from a problem and rely on diagnosis and treatment by better informed experts. Consumers anticipate that experts might engage in fraudulent behavior and abstain from entering the market. We experimentally investigate whether improved consumer knowledge alleviates such market inefficiencies. Consumers...

The ‘doing-using-interacting’ (DUI) mode of innovation describes informal innovative activities and it can be juxtaposed with the ‘science-technology-innovation’ (STI) mode based on deliberate research and development. While both modes contribute substantially but differently to technological progress, our empirical understanding of DUI mode innova...

It is controversially discussed if and which interventions policymakers should implement to promote healthier, more sustainable, and more ethical food choices. Often, policy measures suffer from a lack of data. This is especially true for the growing field of online grocery shopping. Yet, it is not always feasible to test the impact of each possibl...

These guidelines aim to support officials in public administration (whether in the EU, national ministries, agencies, or local administration) in preparing, implementing and/or evaluating real-world regulatory experiments. The guidelines are based on insights from a research project on regulatory experiments that included an extensive literature re...

Background The EU chemicals regulation “Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals” (REACH) aims to reduce the usage of substances of very high concern (SVHCs) by firms. Therefore, a consumer right-to-know about SVHCs in articles is intended to create market-based incentives. However, awareness of the right-to-know among E...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations provide normative orientation for many national and regional governments as well as actors from industry and other parts of the civil society. There is a growing consensus that the corresponding transformation processes needed – e.g., in the field of production and consumption p...

The publication "Regulatory experimentation as a tool to generate learning processes and govern innovation - An analysis of 26 international cases" compares 26 international cases of regulatory experiments. The considered experiments are described and first implications for the implementation of future regulatory experiments are formulated.

Der Modellversuch zum Handel mit Flächenzertifikaten prüfte realitätsnah, ob handelbare Flächenzertifikate ein Instrument sein können, um den Städten und Gemeinden dabei zu helfen, den Flächenverbrauch zu vermindern und die Innenentwicklung zu stärken. Der Modelversuch wurde mit 87 Kommunen aus ganz Deutschland durchgeführt. Er bestand aus zwei zen...

Die digitale Transformation erfasst die handwerklichen Betriebsstrukturen, Branchen und Regionen auf sehr unterschiedliche Weise. Regionale Strategien zur gezielten Förderung der technologischen Wissensdiffusion innovativer digitaler Technologien zu Handwerksbetrieben erfordern daher ein differenziertes Bild des regions- und branchenspezifischen St...

Despite a common EU directive on energy efficiency in residential buildings, levels of energy efficiency differ across European countries. This article analyses these differences and investigates the effectiveness of different energy efficiency policies in place in those countries. We firstly use panel data methods to explain average yearly energy...

We analysed interest rate forecasts from Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. We assessed 532 forecast time series with a total of 85,264 individual interest rate forecasts. To do so, we carried out a comparison to naïve forecasts and investigated the forecast time series...

Um den Digitalisierungsgrad im Bereich der Kundenwerbung und -bindung im Handwerk zu analysieren, wurde eine Webscraping-Analyse durchgeführt. Hierbei wurden Daten der Gelben Seiten sowie Handwerker-Homepages abgerufen und analysiert, wobei Informationen zur Branche, zur regionalen Verortung, zur Aktualität und zur Social-Media- Einbindung von Betr...

Despite a common EU directive on energy efficiency in residential buildings, levels of energy efficiency differ across European countries. This article analyses these differences and investigates the effectiveness of different energy efficiency policies in place in those countries. We firstly use panel data methods to explain average yearly energy...

Today algorithmic decision-making (ADM) is prevalent in several fields including medicine, the criminal justice system, financial markets etc. On the one hand, this is testament to the ever improving performance and capabilities of complex machine learning models. On the other hand, the increased complexity has resulted in a lack of transparency an...

Societies worldwide are investing considerable resources into the safe development and use of nanomaterials. Although each of these protective efforts is crucial for governing the risks of nanomaterials, they are insufficient in isolation. What is missing is a more integrative governance approach that goes beyond legislation. Development of this ap...

Laws have the task of influencing the behaviour of the respective addressees in such a way that the legislator achieves their intended goals. A (new) law would not be required if existing framework conditions were already designed such that regulatory goals could be achieved. In this case actors would already have sufficient incentives to behave in...

This experimental study examines the influence of herding [following the majority of fellow gamblers or the most successful gambler (guru)], status-quo bias, and the gambler’s fallacy on diversification behavior. We find that neither herding nor status-quo bias contributes significantly to non-optimal portfolio choices. The gambler’s fallacy, howev...

Tradable development rights (TDR) are considered by scholars and regulators in various countries as a means of reducing land consumption efficiently. Similar to the development of CO2-certificate trading schemes, the methodology of experimental economics can be used to derive empirical evidence on the core parameters and problems of TDR schemes, th...

Voluntary certification systems potentially reduce search costs in markets with imperfect information. Service markets with many heterogeneous firms – such as the crafts market – are prone to information imperfections and can therefore potentially benefit from such informational mechanisms. We examine if the Meister qualification in the German craf...

Wir untersuchen Zinsprognosen aus Australien, China, Hongkong, Indien, Indonesien, Malaysia, Neuseeland, Singapur, Südkorea, Taiwan und Thailand. Wir werten 532 Prognosezeitreihen mit insgesamt 85.264 einzelnen Zinsprognosen aus. Wir nehmen einen Vergleich zur naiven Prognose vor und untersuchen die Prognosezeitreihen auf gegenwartsorientierte Verl...

We analyzed interest rate forecasts from and Thailand. We assessed 532 forecast time series with a total of 85,264 individual interest rate forecasts. To do so, we carried out a comparison to naïve forecasts and investigated the forecast time series for topically-orientated trend adjustments. In addition, we deployed the sign accuracy test and the...

This paper evaluates survey forecasts for crude oil prices and discusses the implications for decision makers. A novel disaggregated data set incorporating individual forecasts for Brent and Western Texas Intermediate is used. We carry out tests for unbiasedness, sign accuracy, and forecast encompassing, followed by the computation of coefficients...

Der folgende Beitrag erfasst den Prozess der Flächeninanspruchnahme in Deutschland und die daran beteiligten Akteure im Rahmen eines ökonomischen Verhaltensmodells. Im Mittelpunkt stehen hierbei das Anreizgefüge und Informationsumfeld der verschiedenen Nutzergruppen, sowie der Kommunen als der Instanz, die über die Ausweisung von Bebauungsplänen Fl...

Tradable development rights (TDR) are discussed as a mechanism to reduce land consumption while ensuring an efficient implementation of profitable building projects. We present a novel laboratory experiment on the feasibility of TDR and simulate the acquisition and trading of development rights. In particular, we investigate the effects of uncertai...

This study addresses two methods commonly used to measure overconfidence and examines their reliability. It is shown that traditional methods of assessing subjective certainty concerning a given forecast can contribute to a systematic overestimation of overconfidence. It also becomes apparent that a common approach measuring relative overconfidence...

For the first time in economic research, the present experimental study confronted participants with the task to predict stock prices ex ante in order to analyze the interrelation of the behavioral anomalies overconfidence and correlation neglect. The study shows that the participants considerably overestimate their accuracy of forecasting (overcon...

Tradable development rights (TDR) are discussed as a means of containing urban sprawl in numerous countries. Introducing a novel experimental setting, we simulate a cap & trade TDR scheme and investigate the effects of communication, specifically among competing market participants and within teams of decision-makers. Communication reduces auction...

„Nachhaltige Konsum‐ und Produktionsmuster sicherstellen“ („Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns“) – so lautet die Überschrift zum 12. „sustainable development goal“ (SDG) der UN‐Agenda 2030, die 193 Staats‐ und Regierungschefs in der Generalversammlung der Vereinten Nationen am 25. September 2015 angenommen haben. Zu den vereinba...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals aim to minimize the adverse impacts of chemicals on human health and the environment by 2020. It is up to legislators to provide the appropriate framework conditions for such developments. In the case of nanomaterials , this task is however quite challenging, as risks of these substances to human health and the...

Both a vision for future scholarship and a slogan for university restructuring, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by contradictory incentives, bureaucratic frameworks, communication breakdowns, and the strong feelings raised by urgent soci...

In dieser experimentellen Studie wird betrachtet, welchen Einfluss Herdenverhalten (Orientierung an der Mehrheit der Mitspieler oder Orientierung am erfolgreichsten Mitspieler (Guru)), die Status-quoVerzerrung und der Spielerirrtum auf das Diversifikationsverhalten haben. Dabei zeigt sich, dass weder Herdenverhalten noch Status-quoVerzerrungen eine...

This experimental study examines the influence of herding (following the majority of fellow gamblers or the most successful gambler (guru)), status-quo bias and gambler's fallacy on diversification behavior. We come to the result that neither herding nor status-quo biases significantly contribute to non-optimal portfolio choices. Gambler's fallacy,...

Interest rate forecasts are widely used in the international financial services industry. For decades, both practitioners and academic researchers question the quality and usefulness of forecasts. Survey predictions do not only deliver point forecasts but also allow to draw conclusions with regard to the variety of forecasts provided by professiona...

Zusammenfassung Die Einführung handelbarer Flächenzertifikate wird als Regulierungsinstrument zur Reduktion des Flächenverbrauchs in Deutschland diskutiert. Bislang fehlen jedoch empirische Studien zur Untersuchung der Wohlfahrts- und Umverteilungswirkung eines solchen cap & trade Systems. Insbesondere die Frage nach der Effizienz verschiedener Mec...

Markets for credence goods are classified by experts alone being able to identify consumers' problems and determine appropriate services for solution. Examining a market where experts have to invest in costly diagnosis to correctly identify problems and consumers being able to visit multiple experts for diagnosis, we introduce heterogeneously quali...

We investigate credence goods markets in which experts have a moral hazard problem because they need to invest in costly but unobservable effort to identify consumer problems. We distinguish experts to have either high or low skill and can invest either high or low effort in diagnosis with high-skilled experts being able to provide a better diagnos...

Moral hazard in expert diagnoses is more complicated in credence goods markets because ex-post verification of service optimality is not possible. We provide an experimental framework to investigate expert and consumer behavior as well as market efficiency in a setting in which experts need to invest in costly but unobservable effort to identify co...

Certificate trading schemes have been discussed as a cost-efficient means of reducing urban land consumption in Germany by capping and reallocating permissions to conduct building projects. However, in contrast to the established cap & trade systems for emissions, reputation-seeking politicians would be in charge of buying and trading certificates...

Die Flächeninanspruchnahme liegt im Vierjahresdurchschnitt der Jahre 2011 bis 2014 mit 69 Hektar pro Tag immer noch mehr als doppelt so hoch wie von der Bundesregierung vor 14 Jahren in der nationalen Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie festgelegt. Vor dem Hintergrund des 30-Hektar-Zieles hat die Bundesregierung in den Koalitionsverträgen der 17. und 18. Legi...

In this paper we contribute to the discussion on whether intellectual property rights foster or hinder innovation by means of a laboratory experiment. We introduce a novel Scrabble-like word-creation task that captures most essentialities of a sequential innovation process. We use this task to investigate the effects of intellectual property allowi...

Innovation research has developed a broad set of methodological approaches in recent decades. In this paper, we propose laboratory experiments as a fruitful methodological addition to the existing methods in innovation research. Therefore, we provide an overview of the existing methods, discuss the advantages and limitations of laboratory experimen...

Several studies have shown that social identity fosters the provision of public goods and enhances the willingness to reciprocate the cooperative behavior of group members. Nonetheless, the question of how social identity affects negative reciprocity in identity-homogeneous and-heterogeneous groups has only received little attention. Consequently,...

The German government has committed to substantially limiting future land consumption. Among the most prominently discussed policy instruments is the implementation of a cap & trade system for land consumption, in which a limited amount of certificates is allocated to and traded by municipalities. Since these certificates would be a prerequisite fo...

In an experiment on moral cleansing with an endogenously manipulated moral self-image, we examine the role of the addressee of an immoral action. We find that cheating is highest and moral cleansing lowest when subjects cheat at the expense of the experimenter, while cheating is lowest and moral cleansing highest once cheating harms another partici...

Tradable development rights (TDR) are discussed as a means of containing urban sprawl in numerous countries. Despite its theoretical superiority in ensuring an efficient redistribution of planning rights, its applicability is concerned with several open questions and potential problems. Introducing a novel experimental setting, we simulate a cap &...

During recent international climate negotiations like in Paris 2015, the European Union agreed to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. Policy-makers target the residential sector as a major user of fossil energy because potential to improve the energy efficiency in existing houses is observable. Energy audits have been implemented to offer inf...

Markets for expert services are characterized by information asymmetries between experts and consumers. Consumers suffer from either a minor or serious problem and only experts can infer the appropriate treatment. We analyze both the effects on consumer entry decision and expert cheating behavior conditional on consumer information. Consumer inform...

In a democratic society the transition towards sustainable development is not a question of “command and control” policy, rather it depends on the mobilization of proactive contributions from a broad range of different actors. Thus, the regulatory concept has to be designed as “responsive regulation”, based on an inclusive perspective on behavior t...

Die Sanierungsrate bei energetischen Gebäudesanierungen im Wohnsektor ist mit nur einem Prozent sehr niedrig und stagniert seit einigen Jahren. Um die Ziele der Bundesregierung in Bezug auf die Reduktion des CO2-Ausstoßes, zu erreichen, die einen annähernd klimaneutralen Gebäudebestand im Jahr 2050 erfordern, müsste die Sanierungsrate mindestens ve...

Public innovation support claims to reach out to fi rms facing barriers hindering them from innovating, especially smaller fi rms. Earlier studies showed that governmental programmes do not fulfi l those aims. But the distinctions between different political levels introducing programmes were rarely analysed. The authors’ empirical evidence from Ge...

While reputational herding has been shown to contribute to poor economic forecasting, the underlying behavioral mechanisms have not yet been empirically investigated. We run a forecasting experiment with contradictory incentives for accuracy and coordination, finding subjects’ forecasts to be inaccurate and driven by the coordination motive. Coordi...

Private innovative activities receive public innovation support from different political levels. Few studies have empirically evaluated the influence of political systems on the reception of public innovation support and no other studies have evaluated innovation support across Europe with CIS data.This paper analyses the differences between federa...

In this paper we contribute to the discussion on whether intellectual property rights foster or hinder innovation by means of a laboratory experiment. We introduce a novel Scrabble-like creativity task that captures most essentialities of a sequential innovation process. We use this task to investigate the effects of intellectual property allowing...

The importance of sustainability orientation in the assessment of innovation becomes increasingly important as firms face macro-structural transformations, strong competition and stakeholder pressure towards sustainable conduct. However, traditional approaches to innovation assessment focus on financial outcomes and fail to capture the double exter...

Reputational herding has been considered as a driving force behind economic and financial forecasts clustered around consensus values. Strategic coordination can consequently explain poor performances of prediction markets as resulting from the distinct incentives that forecasters face. While this notion has been considered theoretically and empiri...

Individuals who share a common identity show persistently elevated contributions to public goods. Yet, so far the factors that actually trigger this welfare enhancement are not precisely understood. We investigate two channels: (1) subjects’ expectations on group members’ cooperativeness and (2) the degree to which they reciprocate these expectatio...

Several studies have shown that social identity fosters the provision of public goods and enhances the willingness to reciprocate cooperative behavior of group members dependent on the social environment. Yet, the question of how social identity affects negative reciprocity in identity-homogeneous and -heterogeneous groups has received only little...

The question to what extent social environment affects how individuals govern their groups, has received no special academic attention, yet. Within the framework of a ten-period public goods experiment we analyse how social identity affects subjects' choice of punishment: The may either sanction group members by monetary and/or by non-monetary sanc...

This article analyzes how the anticipation of peer-punishment affects cooperativeness in the provision of public goods under social identity. For this purpose we conduct one-shot public good games with induced social identity and implement in-group, out-group and random matching protocols. Our measure of cooperativeness is subjects’ conditional con...

Certificate trading schemes have been discussed as a cost-efficient means of reducing land use in Germany by capping and reallocating permissions to conduct building projects. However, in contrast to the established cap & trade systems for emissions, reputation-seeking politicians would be in charge of buying and trading certificates – an aspect no...

Zusammenfassung Die Idee, handelbare Nutzungszertifikate auf den Problembereich der Flächeninanspruchnahme für Siedlung und Verkehr zu übertragen, wird in Wissenschaft und Politik seit über 15 Jahren diskutiert. Dennoch blieb es in Deutschland lange Zeit bei wissenschaftlichen Erörterungen und Vorschlägen sachverständiger Politikberatungsgremien, b...

Reverse auctions are an established policy instrument for allocating conservation contracts. While the auction mechanism has been the subject of a number of studies, less attention has been paid to the post-bidding contract phase. As contracts involving natural resource management are usually incomplete, trust becomes crucial for the effectiveness...

What appropriation strategies are chosen by innovative small firms? A cluster analysis of data from the German CIS was carried out to indentify four distinct modes of appropriability in the small enterprise sector. The results show that for many innovative small firms the key question is not whether to use intellectual property rights (IPRs) or not...

Behavioral biases in forecasting, particularly the lack of adjustment from current values and the overall clustering of forecasts, are increasingly explained as resulting from the anchoring heuristic. Nonetheless, the classical anchoring experiments presented in support of this interpretation lack external validity for economic domains, particularl...

Competitive bidding is considered to be a cost-effective allocation mechanism for payments for ecosystem services. This article shows that competition is not a necessary condition for sustaining cost-effectiveness in the long run. In a repeated conservation auction, learning, specific investments and the creation of social capital bias the chances...

Traditionally economic theory assumes that preferences are stable facilitating positive predictions of economic policy. While there is conflicting experimental evidence on the temporal stability of cooperation preferences in public goods provision, surprisingly little is known about their stability in different institutional settings. We contribute...

This paper focuses on the revision of the “sui generis” system of geographical indications in the European Union, one of the most debated instruments protecting intellectual property. Here, we suggest fundamental improvements to increase the transparency and thereby the information-­economic function of geographical indicators (Protected Designatio...

This paper focuses on the revision of the “sui generis” system of geographical indications in the European Union, one of the most debated instruments protecting intellectual property. Here, we suggest fundamental improvements to increase the transparency and thereby the information-­economic function of geographical indicators (Protected Designatio...

This article addresses the current international debate on the protection of cultural goods. Whereas some groups (such as indigenous peoples) are arguing for the creation of cultural property rights analogous to classic intellectual property rights such as patent and copyright, most industrialized countries advocate to keep cultural goods within th...

Based on an institutional analysis of the incentive situation of desk officers, the DG’s leading officers as well as the Impact Assessment Board, the Inter-Service Steering Group (now called the IASC) and interest groups this chapter develops hypotheses on the functioning of impact assessments and their quality. Checked against the literature and 3...

In addition to a broad range of qualitative land development objectives, the German Federal Government has committed itself to reduce the growth of settlement and traffic areas from currently 113 ha (2004–2007) to 30 ha per day by 2020. In order to attain this ambitious quantitative goal, our paper presents a market-based policy of ‘tradable planni...