Life’s Big Decisions in the Age of AI

Maryse Kathleen Ngangoue, Andrew Schotter and Bill Wang

No 12515, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The Big Decisions in our lives, having a child, getting married, getting educated, etc. are transformative decisions that are hard to make. As a result, people often seek advice before making them. However, since people tend to live in homophilous social networks the advice received from their friends and neighbors may simply reinforce the decisions that people like them are already making. We investigate whether the advice offered by ChatGPT for such decisions can be useful in broadening the advice people receive and how such advice varies as we change the prompted socioeconomic backgrounds of the advisee and advisor. We find that advice tends to be confirmatory for low-income groups, in that it reinforces their established choices, while being dis-confirming for high-income groups, where it prompts reconsideration. Furthermore, even when suggesting the same choice, ChatGPT justifies that choice differently depending on who it is talking to. These findings suggest that AI-generated advice may differentially shape life’s Big Decisions across social strata.

Keywords: LLM; generative AI; big decisions; transformative decisions; advice; SES (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D83 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12515

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