 Increasing the external validity of social preference games by reducing measurement errorXinghua Wang and Daniel Navarro-Martinez Games and Economic Behavior, 2023, vol. 141, issue C, 261-285 Abstract: An increasing number of studies call into question the external validity of social preference games. In this paper, we show that these games have a low correlation with single pro-social behaviors in the field, but this correlation can be substantially increased by aggregating behaviors to reduce measurement error. We tracked people's daily pro-social behaviors for 14 days using a day reconstruction method; the same people played three different social preference games on seven different occasions. We show that, as more pro-social behaviors and game rounds are aggregated, the games become much better predictors of pro-sociality. This predictive power is further increased by using statistical methods designed to better account for measurement error. These findings suggest that social preference games capture important underlying dispositions of real-world pro-sociality, and they can be successfully used to predict aggregated pro-social inclinations. This has crucial implications for the external validity and applicability of economic games. Keywords: Social preference games; External validity; Field behavior; Measurement error; Aggregation; Day reconstruction method (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:141:y:2023:i:c:p:261-285 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2023.06.006 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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