Intertemporal Choice Shifts in Households: Do they occur and are they good?

Fredrik Carlsson and Xiaojun Yang ()
Additional contact information
Xiaojun Yang: Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: Box 640, SE 40530 GÖTEBORG, Sweden

No 569, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: We examine whether and to what extent joint choices are more or less patient and time-consistent than individual choices in households. We use data from an artefactual field experiment where both individual and joint time preferences were elicited. We find a substantial shift from individual to joint household decisions. Interestingly, joint decisions do not only generate beneficial shifts, i.e., patient and time-consistent shifts. On the contrary, a majority of the observed shifts are impatient and time-inconsistent shifts. A number of observable characteristics are significantly correlated with these shifts in preferences from individual decisions to joint decisions.

Keywords: individual decisions; joint decisions; patience; time-consistency; choice shifts; rural China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 C93 D10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2013-07-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/33591 (text/html)

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:hhs:gunwpe:0569

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().