(d) Utility Theory and Welfare Economics

Coordinator: Rainer Marggraf

The general economic behavior model, developed by the American Nobel Prize laureate Gary S. Becker, offers the basis for integrating the various motives of individual valuations of ecosystem services into the utility theory. The working group develops this model using the following theories: Ajzen’s planned behavior theory, Schwarz’s norm-activation model and Rogers’s Protection Motivation Theory (PMT). We are primarily interested in studying the criteria that are used for decision making. We analyze the “purely psychological” benefits and costs that are relevant for allocation decisions.


This research group cooperates with the research group on environmental education research (Prof. Dr. S. Bögeholz) and the research group on historical anthropology and human ecology (Prof. Dr. B. Herrmann).


Additional projects of the section for environmental and resource economics:
1. Germany: coexistence of farming and genetically modified plants (Project GEN-RISK).
2. Germany: economic rational for the mycotoxin problem.
3. Germany and France: institutional support of the implementation of the EU water directive.
4. Georgia: evaluating of farmers preferences for a rural finance system.
5. Cameroon: policies of mitigating climate change.
6. Germany: Environmental history: the role of the concepts of luck in cameralism and utilitarism and the role of natural disasters for the perception of the environment in former times.