Stability of experimental and survey measures of risk, time, and social preferences: A review and some new results

Yating Chuang and Laura Schechter

Journal of Development Economics, 2015, vol. 117, issue C, 151-170

Abstract: Underlying preferences are often considered to be persistent, and are important inputs into economic models. We first conduct an extensive review of the disparate literature studying the stability of preferences measured in experiments. Then, we test the stability of individuals' choices in panel data from rural Paraguay over almost a decade. Answers to social preference survey questions are quite stable. Experimental measures of risk, time, and social preferences do not exhibit much stability. Correlations between experimental measures of risk aversion are a more precisely estimated zero, whereas correlations for time and social preferences are larger and noisier. We also find no systematic evidence that real world shocks influence play in games. We suggest that in a developing country context researchers should explore designing simpler experiments and including survey questions in addition to experiments to measure preferences.

Keywords: Stability of preferences; Risk preferences; Time preferences; Social preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (237)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387815000875
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:deveco:v:117:y:2015:i:c:p:151-170

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2015.07.008

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().