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"This thesis consists of three essays that analyze choices and beliefs to explore how both lead to adaptive behavior. The first essay examines the positive net migration flow from the eastern to western parts of Germany. The migration decision is substantially based on expectations about future developments. With economic conditions changing substantially over the past 20 years in the eastern part of Germany, the incentives to migrate have also altered, so changing the composition of the east-to-west migrant body. This essay explores variations in economic disparities between the region of origin and region of destination, relating them to changes in the skill level, age and labor force status of the migrant population. Analyzing SOEP data from 1993-2011, the findings suggest that, with falling wage differentials, older migrants are less frequent job-to-job movers and are more likely to be non-working prior to migration. Furthermore, while migrants tend to be younger and better educated than stayers, the group of movers becomes partly less distinct from the group of stayers with respect to the skill and age composition when regional disparities in employment opportunities increase. The second and the third essay of this thesis model the decision making process in social interactions between strangers. In these situations, choices are often affected by beliefs about others behavior. In the second essay of this work, I develop a simple model of prosocial behavior for encounters between strangers. By abstracting from the possibility of reputation building and punishment between anonymous partners, I remove the main strategic motives for prosocial behavior so reducing it to a simple non-strategic decision. The principal motivation to behave prosocially is then intrinsic, based on altruism, with a taste for conforming to the behavior of others. In this way, individual decisions are conditional on the behavior of others. Emerging equilibria will then explain the occurrence of prosocial or cooperative behavior within a given society. In a second step, I analyze whether the model's predictions are consistent with the empirical evidence on the link between beliefs and prosocial behavior using data on blood donations. The third essay outline a (possible) micro-structure and conditions which lead to the observed urban-rural differences in cooperative behavior using agent-based modeling. The model presented here adapts the familiar framework of a prisoners dilemma which is played repeatedly with randomly matched members of a large population. I introduce features that are often found in real world interactions: imperfect information, voluntary participation and a taste for conforming to majority behavior. In this analysis, peoples beliefs about the level of cooperation in the population and their resulting behavior are determined endogenously. Both are governed principally by the experience that they derive from interactions. I present results of an agent-based simulation in order to study the emerging dynamic relationships, to examine how cooperative behavior evolves over time under different circumstances, and to determine how urban-rural differences in behavior emerge. The factors that give rise to rural-urban differences are heterogeneity in individual loss aversion or risk taking, and limited migration possibilities between rural and urban areas."Die ALLBUS-Daten von 2002-2010 werden verwendet, um generalisiertes Vertrauen, welches als unabhängige Variable in die Analyse aufgenommen wird, zu messen.
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