Making sense of monkey business: Re-examining tests of animal rationality

Roy Allen, Pawel Dziewulski and John Rehbeck

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, vol. 196, issue C, 220-228

Abstract: This paper re-examines research that studies economic rationality using experimental data generated by nonhuman animals (e.g. rats, pigeons, monkeys, etc.). The standard experimental methodology to elicit choices from nonhuman animals allows a researcher to test three types of economic rationality: standard deterministic utility maximization, average choice rationality, and random utility maximization. Most of the research has evaluated whether animals satisfy average choice rationality. We describe the difference between these models and check each type of rationality on capuchin monkey data from Chen et al.(2006). We reject standard deterministic utility maximization and random utility maximization for most subjects, but we cannot reject average choice rationality. This paper is the first to provide a statistical test for average choice rationality.

Keywords: Animal Choice; Rationality; Stochastic Choice; Revealed Preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122000518
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:jeborg:v:196:y:2022:i:c:p:220-228

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.02.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().