TY - THES A1 - Zeidler, Helen T1 - Preferences, individual decision-making and government interventions BT - [cumulative dissertation] N2 - "Present Bias in Choices over Food and Money: Evidence from a Framed Field Experiment" - this paper presents results from a field experiment investigating dynamically inconsistent time preferences over real food choices and commitment take-up in a natural environment. We implement a longitudinal consumption experiment with a continuous convex budget: College students repeatedly choose and consume lunch menus at their college canteen. We not only allow for a full continuum of healthy or unhealthy foods; we also explicitly design the consumption stage to comply with the consume-on-receipt assumption: utility is created right after handing out the food. The paper also focuses on the implications for effective policy design: It sheds light on consumers' tendency to utilize different types of self-control devices to commit to personal consumption plans. We further compare inconsistent behavior between convex food and money choices to investigate the applicability of monetary reward studies to natural behavior. We find no correlation between time parameters in food vs. money tasks. Utility estimates from food choices suggest that dynamically consistent individuals substitute internal self-control with commitment take-up. Non-committing individuals tend to be present-biased and naive about their inconsistency. "Dynamic Inconsistencies and Food Waste: Assessing Food Waste from a Behavioral Economics Perspective" - this paper investigates the link between dynamically inconsistent time preferences and individual food consumption and waste behavior. Food waste is conceptualized as unintended consequence of consumption choices along the food consumption chain: Because inconsistent individuals postpone the consumption of healthier food at home, storage time is prolonged and food more likely to be wasted. Capitalizing on a rich data set from a nationally representative survey, the paper constructs targeted measures of time-related food consumption and waste behaviors. In line with the theory, the paper finds that more present-biased individuals waste more food. The mechanism can be empirically supported: Although dynamically inconsistent individuals plan their food consumption, they deviate from their consumption plans more compared to consistent individuals. Deviation behavior is significantly associated with food waste. The paper points to the importance of considering dynamic inconsistencies at different stages of the food consumption process to foster the intended effects of food policies (increase in healthy nutrition) and diminish unintended consequences (increase in food waste). "Economic Behavior under Containment: How do People Respond to Covid-19 Restrictions?" - this paper investigates the effects of policy interventions on individual decision-making and preferences by looking at a period of unprecedentedly strict regulation: the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on Germany, we measure regulatory strictness by calculating a policy stringency index at the federal state level. Capitalizing on exogenous variation in predetermined election cycles across states, we instrument policy stringency with the distance to the next election. Results support a positive relation between weeks to next election and state policy stringency. Leveraging a nationally representative short panel, the paper exploits this exogenous variation in policy stringency across states and over time to assess behavioral changes in different economic domains. The paper finds that government restrictions increase working from home and the provision of childcare at home, while it reduces the number of grocery shopping trips. Containment policies also affect risk preferences and fear of Covid-19: individuals become more risk-averse and afraid of Covid-19 as a consequence of stricter policies. The results are robust against various different model specifications. KW - Verbraucherverhalten KW - Verhaltensökonomie KW - Lebensmittelverbrauch KW - Lebensmittelabfall KW - individual decision-making KW - government interventions KW - food policy Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:824-opus4-8449 ER - TY - THES A1 - Ling, Kunxiong T1 - Data aggregation and sampling procedures for usage profiling and customer-centric automotive systems engineering BT - [kumulative Dissertation] N2 - Specifying or deriving customers' needs into detailed requirements becomes essential for holistic customer-centricity in automotive systems engineering, relying heavily on simulation models. However, with the increase of system complexity, customer diversity, and difficulty of customer data acquisition, it becomes challenging to specify model inputs that represent individual customer usage behavior across the whole product lifecycle. To let these challenges be tackled, this dissertation addresses the problem of customer usage profiling to support decision-making in the context of automotive systems engineering. First, two fundamental data engineering procedures are investigated, including data aggregation for feature reduction and sampling for representing the customer fleets with a few selected reference customers. After data preprocessing, a method for preparing the model inputs from aggregate customer data, i.e., usage profiling, is developed. Usage profiling applies meta-heuristics, synthesizing sufficiently representative from aggregate fleet data. Furthermore, a decision support system is developed to deploy the aggregation, sampling, and usage profiling into model-based automotive system engineering processes. As both data and various models are connected, digital twinning is applied. Using real-world fleet data, an evaluation case study for determining lifetime requirements indicates that the methodology is plausible and capable of consolidating customer-centricity into automotive systems engineering processes. N2 - Die Spezifizierung oder Ableitung von Kundenbedürfnissen in Form von detaillierten Anforderungen ist für eine ganzheitliche Kundenorientierung in der Fahrzeugsystemtechnik, die sich stark auf Simulationsmodelle stützt, unerlässlich. Mit zunehmender Systemkomplexität, Kundenvielfalt und der Schwierigkeit, Kundendaten zu erfassen, wird es jedoch schwieriger, Modelleingaben zu spezifizieren, die das individuelle Nutzungsverhalten der Kunden über den gesamten Produktlebenszyklus hinweg repräsentieren. Um diese Herausforderungen zu bewältigen, befasst sich diese Dissertation mit dem Problem der Erstellung von Kundennutzungsprofilen zur Unterstützung der Entscheidungsfindung im Kontext der Fahrzeugsystemtechnik. Zunächst werden zwei grundlegende Verfahren der Datenverarbeitung untersucht, darunter die Datenaggregation zur Merkmalsreduktion und das Sampling zur Repräsentation der Kundenflotten mit wenigen ausgewählten Referenzkunden. Nach der Datenvorverarbeitung wird eine Methode zur Aufbereitung der Modelleingaben aus den aggregierten Kundendaten, das sogenannte Nutzungsprofilierung, entwickelt. Bei der Nutzungsprofilierung werden Meta-Heuristiken eingesetzt, die es ermöglichen, aus den aggregierten Flottendaten ausreichend repräsentative Daten zu synthetisieren. Darüber hinaus wird durch den Einsatz von Aggregation, Sampling und Nutzungsprofilierung in modellbasierten Fahrzeugentwicklungsprozessen ein Entscheidungsunterstützungssystem entwickelt. Da sowohl die Daten als auch die verschiedenen Modelle miteinander verbunden sind, wird der Rahmen der Erstellung digitaler Zwillinge angewendet. Anhand von realen Flottendaten zeigt eine Evaluierungsfallstudie zur Ermittlung von Lebensdaueranforderungen, dass die Methodik plausibel und in der Lage ist, die Kundenorientierung in die Systementwicklungsprozesse der Automobilindustrie zu integrieren. KW - Kundenprofil KW - Customization KW - Aggregation KW - Automotive Systems Engineering KW - Customer Centricity KW - Sampling KW - Usage Profiling KW - Verbraucherverhalten KW - Kraftfahrzeugindustrie KW - Stichprobe Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:824-opus4-8026 ER -