Jahresbericht 2004

The Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 504 at the University of Mannheim is an internationally oriented National Research Center, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the German National Science Foundation. Established in 1997, the SFB forms a research network that links the Departments of Business Administration, Economics, and Social Sciences. Its main goal is to provide a research environment for both its members and visiting researchers from all around the world. To stimulate scientific exchange across the various disciplines involved, the SFB organizes weekly research seminars as well as frequent international conferences and workshops. The SFB has its own Discussion Paper Series, a newsletter, and it provides central services such as secretarial and computational support to its members and guests. The SFB also has its own PC laboratory which is especially designed to host computer-based experiments. The research program of the SFB 504 comprises the theoretical foundation, empirical analysis and economic application of behavior which cannot be described by standard expected utility theory. This research program involves projects from three different disciplines: business administration, economics, and social psychology. It has long been recognized that while theoretically appealing in many respects, the standard paradigm of rational behavior is too restrictive to be useful in the analysis of human decisions in many real-world situations. We therefore want to study models based on real behavior. Some of these models take into account the cognitive limitations of the decision-maker, i.e. limitations of both knowledge and analytical or computational capacity. Some other models imply optimization procedures which are able to describe a set of behavior richer than that described by expected utility. The SFB 504 addresses the foundation and application of behavior in three interdependent projects: Researchers involved in the SFB analyze the cognitive process of individual decision-making mainly in experimental studies (Projectgroup A), they investigate various concepts of decision-making in economic applications (Projectgroup B), and they assess the implications of a richer set of behavior in different institutional contexts such as organizations or markets (Projectgroup C). It is hoped that this research effort will eventually lead to a better understanding of human decision-making in general, and to an improved ability to analyze the influence of the actual decision-making process on the decisions that are eventually reached in real-world situations.