Pourquoi prend-on ou non des risques ? Pourquoi ne recycle-t-on pas davantage ? En situation d'incertitude, quels prix immobiliers peut-on anticiper ? Pour d'éventuelles explications et pronostics concernant ces questions, les principes d'économie comportementale peuvent être invoqués. L'économie comportementale (CE) est l'association de la psychologie et de l'économie ayant pour but de donner une explication aux comportements observés sur les marchés, comportements humains faisant preuve de rationalité limitée et de raisonnements complexes (Mullainathan et Thaler, 2000). L'étude de l'économie comportementale a inspiré un grand nombre de théories différentes et a été utilisée dans de nombreuses applications empiriques et cette thèse suit le même schéma en explorant différentes applications de l'économie comportementale. Cette thèse développe trois nouvelles extensions de l'économie comportementale aux champs du management, du choix en termes de politiques et en termes de décision d'investissement immobilier. / Why do we take risks or we do not? Why do not we recycle more? Under uncertainty what do we expect will happen to our home prices? These and many other questions are asked on daily basis.For possible explanations and answers to these and similar questions principles of behavioural economics can be used. Behavioural economics (BE) is the combination of psychology and economics that investigates what happens in markets in which some of agents display human limitations and complications (Mullainathan and Thaler, 2000). Behavioural economics provides more realistic psychological foundations to increase explanatory and predictive power of economic theory. The study of behavioural economics has inspired a number of different theories and has been used in many applications, and this thesis follows the same path and investigates different applications of behavioural economics. This thesis explores three novel applications of behavioural economics to management, policy making and property investment decision making.

Conspicuous consumption is a form of economic behaviour in which social pressure influences consumption decisions. Considering the current understanding of the detrimental ecological impact of excessive consumption practices, this paper overviews the potential to lessen wasteful consumption trends by utilising conspicuous consumption. This paper overviews research into this phenomenon, commencing with Thorstein Veblen’s work at the end of the nineteenth century. Combining this with research from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper suggests potential indicators of sustainable consumption tendencies, including personality traits and group dynamics. The empirical aspect of this study successfully replicates the findings of a recent investigation into conspicuous consumption; that is, that consumption increases when conducted in public and income is linked to status. This study has been updated to include various aspects of sustainability behaviour and knowledge and has found trends associated with students of sustainability in Uppsala, Sweden. Furthermore, this paper suggests that the encouragement of conspicuous forms of sustainability could inspire sustainable consumption trends, or potentially lead to a reduction of overall consumption. Finally, this paper makes recommendations for policy makers in order to encourage social sustainability practices, building upon nascent movements such as 'Flygskam' ('Flight Shame') and successful anti-smoking strategies.

An aging Swedish population is putting an increased pressure on the Swedish pension system. To address this, the Swedish pension system was reformed in the late 1990s. This reformation resulted in an increased individual responsibility for pension investments among the Swedish population. The individual responsibility has shown to be challenging for many since they feel a great uncertainty in this area. Adding to the notion that the Swedish population is aging; young Swedes are also entering the working life later than before, without planning to retire later than the current seniors. This will implicate that a smaller part of the retirement payments will come from the national public pension, making the individual's pension planning more important. This means that the role of occupational pension and private savings has and will grow in importance years to come.Even so, private pension savings among young people is decreasing. Young people born between 1980 and 2000, often denoted Millennials (also called Generation Y) in literature, are an interesting cohort to research, since they will be the first generation to experience the full impact of the new Swedish pension system. Recent studies indicate that this generation has low interest for pension planning and that they find information about pensions hard to understand. The study will, therefore, investigate how Swedish Millennials could become better informed, engaged and active in their pension planning.The study was conducted through interviews with five representatives from the Swedish pension industry and a survey with 146 Swedish Millennials.Findings indicated that the Millennials’ current attitudes towards pension have a negative impact on their pension planning behaviour. It has been concluded that Millennials engagement to pension planning can be strengthened by improving four factors: Relevance, Content, Channels and Motivation

This thesis acknowledges the increasingly important issue of global freshwater scarcity. It focuses on water consumption in private households and examines whether social nudging, specifically the focus theory of normative conduct, can serve as a tool to reduce it. This is examined through action research conducted on the island of Gotland, Sweden, in cooperation with the local major housing company GotlandsHem. Despite some limitations, the findings show with a significance of 0.033 that, on average, almost 50 litres of water less were used weekly by each household after two social nudging interventions. This corresponds to 7,472.99 litres for all 151 nudged households. The findings show that the research design represents a way for housing companies to use the focus theory of normative conduct from the field of social nudging to reduce their tenants’ water consumption.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

<p>The overarching theme of this research is about environmental microplastic pollution, and how much various entities are willing to sacrifice economically to obtain a cleaner environment. To gauge such willingness, this research utilizes various economic measures that have been widely used, albeit with novel modifications. The focus of this research is on stated preferences about microplastic pollution. The topic of microplastics is still very novel, and market players on the demand side or on the supply side have yet to provide products that deal with this new pollutant. This lack has necessitated the need for stated preference research. This research delves into this novel environmental problem from various viewpoints.</p> <p> Chapter 1 of this research is about how much the US adult population is willing to sacrifice to obtain an environment that is less impacted by microplastic pollution. The results show that US adults in general possess a willingness to obtain an environment free from microplastics. However, a sizable minority of US adults do not show such willingness as well. Such results remained true even when information about microplastic pollution were provided to all respondents before preference elicitation. </p> <p> Chapter 2 investigates how much consumers in different countries will diverge about their willingness to pay for seafood that has less microplastic contamination. The countries chosen differed widely in their seafood consumption habits. Thus, it was hypothesized that such differences will lead to contrasts in their willingness to pay for less contaminated seafood. The hypothesis was found to be true but not in the way that was expected. The results show that frequent consumers of seafood had less willingness to pay when compared to others, although in whole all consumers showed willingness to avoid microplastics in their seafood. </p> <p> Chapter 3 makes use of the same data as Chapter 2 but looks at possible reasons for the disparity in responses besides factors explored in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on the cultural differences to explain the differences in behavior. To do so, it utilizes the Value-Belief-Norm theory widely employed in past research but modifies it to account for a form of hypothetical bias. The research delves into the relationships between many factors of interest that affect environmentally friendly consumption behavior and the findings show that a certain cultural tendency is central to such behavior, at least for microplastics. </p> <p> The research has done its best to research into the economic relationship between microplastic contamination of the environment and how much various individuals are willing to sacrifice to obtain an environment that is less impacted by such pollution. The findings here show that there is room for improvement in the way the microplastic pollution problem is being handled. However, in all settings the results show that a sizable majority want to be less impacted by microplastic pollution, a key takeaway for all interested parties.</p>

The understanding that humans are bounded in their rationality has been proven to manifest in complex decision making as a result of a limit in the amount of information available, the cognitive limitations of the mind and the amount of time available in which to make a decision. Because of this, humans have been known to appeal to heuristics and the rules of thumb (termed 'satisficing‘) when making decisions, resulting in biased probability judgments and not maximizing expected utility. Corporate application of bounded rationality is still very limited. This study builds on and advances the study and application of bounded rationality in corporate environments, using climate change response as a real-life situation, and in a circular fashion help explain some of the debates and paradoxes that agitate researchers from the climate change community. Using a mixed methods comparative case study of two organisations‘ responses to climate change, the study theorises that competitive market forces and the ability of organisations to learn from other organisations limits the levels of 'satisficing‘ in strategic decision making. Instead, the limited amount of information and the fear of the unknown cause organizations to approach the subject cautiously. A tactical interpretive climate change response framework emerges. / Business Management / D.B.L.

This thesis takes three different perspectives, using theoretical and experimental techniques, on time-inconsistent preferences and how the existence of multiple selves can affect both consumer behaviour and policy design. Across domains such as retirement saving, health, and educational achievement, intertemporal choice presents a challenge for both individuals and policymakers. The first paper, 'Choosing When to Nudge: Designing Behavioural Policy around Decision-Making Costs,' considers how behavioural policy, which has proven increasingly popular with policymakers, affects welfare. I find that for present-biased consumers, behavioural policies help some consumers but can inefficiently discourage others from optimizing. Such policies therefore have an ambiguous effect on welfare, and similar to traditional policies, can impose equity-efficiency tradeoffs. Monopolies may increase welfare given their incentive to simplify consumer decisions instead of exploit switching costs. The second paper, 'Virtue and Vice with Endogenous Preferences,' considers behaviour when preferences are affected by consumer decisions. I introduce agents whose temptation to consume in the present is affected by how much they choose to save for the future. I find that differences between agents can trap them in divergent paths of self-improvement -- saving more, they value the future more, making saving optimal -- or binging -- consuming more makes them indifferent to future costs, making consumption optimal. At the extreme, it is frequently an optimum for a consumer to consume their entire wealth. The final paper, 'Bet You Can't Eat Just One: Consumption Complementarity and 'Self'-Control' considers an intrapersonal game between a moderate cold self and a hot self that wants to indulge. In equilibrium, sophisticated selves best respond to each other's behaviour: the cold self over-abstains and the hot self over-indulges to avoid inducing the other state. I test these ideas in the lab, and find that subjects on a diet who were induced to consume a piece of chocolate before the experiment indulge more in chocolate during the experiment, even when the initial indulgence was imposed by the experimenter. Eating a piece of chocolate, this suggests, can induce a period during which chocolate is more appealing.

This work is mainly focused on the environment of stock markets. It aims to identify some psychological and sociological factors relating to investors' behaviour which may help to justify occurrence of excessive movements in stock market prices resulting in price "bubbles" and stock market crashes. It emphasizes that the assumptions for the validity of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis based on dominant position of rational investors in stock markets have been empirically undermined by number of experiments and observations. As one of the most vigorous alternative challenging the Efficient Market Hypothesis is now considered the theory of behavioural finance stressing some imperfections of human behaviour which may substantially influence dynamics of stock market prices in both directions.

This thesis is an investigation of how subjects behave in an individual binary choice decision task with the option to purchase or observe for free additional information before reaching a decision. In part 1 of this thesis, an investigative study is conducted with the intent to sharpen the view to literature concerning corresponding psychology and economics experiments designed to test decision tasks that involve purchasing and observing information from an imperfect message prior to taking a terminal action choice. This investigative study identifies areas of research that warrant further investigation as well as provides enhancements for execution in the subsequent experiment conducted in Part 2 & 3 of this thesis. In Part 2 & 3, I conduct an experiment to test how subjects behave in an individual binary choice decision task with the option to purchase or observe for free additional information before reaching a final decision. I find that subjects’ behaviour over time converges toward optimal decisions prior to observing an imperfect information signal. However, when subjects observe an imperfect information signal prior to their terminal choice there is greater deviation from optimal behaviour. I find in addition to behaviour that is reflective of a risk-neutral BEU maximizer, status quo bias, over-weighing the informational value of the message received and past statistically independent outcomes influencing future choices. The subjects’ willingness to pay (WTP) to use the additional information gathered from an imperfect message service when making a final decision was on average less than the risk neutral BEU willingness to pay benchmark. Moreover, as the informative value of the message increased, causing the BEU valuation to increase, subjects under-estimated the value of the message signal to a greater degree. Although risk attitudes may have influenced the subjects’ WTP decisions, it does not account for the increased conservative WTP behaviour when information became more valuable. Additionally, the findings from this study suggest that individuals adopt different decision rules depending on both personal attributes (i.e. skillset, gender, experience) and on the context and environment in which the decision task is conducted. / SSHRC grant: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council via Dr. Bram Cadsby Professor Department of Economics, University of Guelph