Delegation and Children’s Decision-Making: Evidence from Thailand

Ramon Cobo-Reyes, Santiago Garcia-Couto, Weerachart Kilenthong, Simone Meraglia and Matthias Sutter ()
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Ramon Cobo-Reyes: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY QATAR
Santiago Garcia-Couto: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY QATAR
Weerachart Kilenthong: UNIVERSITY OF THE THAI CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
Simone Meraglia: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER BUSINESS SCHOOL
Matthias Sutter: Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics

No 19089, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We study whether children’s behavior changes when caregivers delegate a decision to them. Running an experiment with 956 caregiver-child pairs in Thailand, we let caregivers either retain decision rights or delegate them to children across four incentivized tasks covering time, risk, competitive, and social preferences. We find domain-specific effects of delegation. Delegation makes children more patient, but we find no effects on risk, competitive and social preferences. A simple theoretical framework can rationalize this pattern, as it predicts delegation to affect behavior most when caregivers’ and children’s preferences diverge substantially, as is primarily the case in the time-preference task.

Keywords: delegation; children; autonomy; time preferences; reciprocity; lab-in-the-field (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D91 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-11
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