Perceived Wealth, Cognitive Sophistication and Behavioral Inattention

Tiziana Assenza, Alberto Cardaci and Domenico Delli Gatti

No 7992, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: By means of a laboratory experiment, we show that, contrary to standard consumer theory, financially equivalent balance sheet profiles may be perceived as non fungible in a controlled frictionless environment with no probabilistic attributes. A large majority of subjects indeed have a bias in the perception of wealth, such that balance sheet composition matters: for a given net worth with values of assets and debt that are financially certain and risk-free, a greater asset-debt ratio implies greater perceived wealth. The predominance of this bias is explained by low cognitive sophistication and great inattention. Moreover, biased subjects are less patient, less debt averse, more likely to increase spending out of unexpected gains and report greater propensities to consume. A standard optimal consumption choice model, enriched with a rational but inattentive agent à la Gabaix (2014, 2019), aligns our key experimental findings.

Keywords: perceived wealth; cognitive sophistication; behavioral inattention; laboratory experiment; household debt; consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D91 G41 G51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-neu and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7992.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Perceived wealth, cognitive sophistication and behavioral inattention (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7992

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().