 Measuring Economic Preferences with Behavioral Experiments and Surveys Across the GlobeMichael Kosfeld, Zahra Sharafi, Maira Sontag Gonzalez and Na Zou No 19845, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research Abstract: Recent work in economics has developed survey-based measures of economic preferences that are “experimentally†or “behaviorally validated.†We scrutinize this approach focusing on the Global Preference Survey (Falk et al., 2018, 2023). Replicating their behavioral validation on almost 2,000 participants in five countries, China, Colombia, Iran, Kenya, and the US, we find that many items correlate significantly with behavior in incentivized choice experiments, but coefficients vary and are not always sizable. While hypothetical versions of an experiment consistently show the strongest correlations, qualitative self-assessments are also almost always among the best single-item modules predicting behavior in all countries. Within- and across-preference principal component analyses, as well as comparison in terms of predictive validity, suggest that qualitative self-assessments and behavioral measures capture distinct dimensions of the same latent construct of an economic preference, casting doubt on the use of one instrument as an easy substitute for the other. JEL-codes: C83 C91 D01 (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:cpr:ceprdp:19845 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK. |
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