Are the Smart Kids More Rational ?

Sabrina Bruyneel, Laurens Cherchye, Sam Cosaert, Bram De Rock and Siegfried Dewitte

Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: We conducted an experiment to collect data on consumption decisions made by children of different age categories. In particular, our experiment involves unsophisticated discrete consumption choices,and we present a rationality test that is specially designed for the resulting choice data. Our firstconclusion is that, in general, the observed children's consumption behavior is largely irrational. Next, we also investigate the relationship between the degree of rationality and the children's characteristics.Specically, we use teacher based assessments on several personal characteristics to investigate whether and to what extent smart children tend to behave more rational. Here, our main conclusion is that it is important to recognize the multidimensional nature of intelligence to obtain a balanced insight into the effect of intelligence on rationality.

Keywords: rationality; children; revealed-preference; intelligence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C91 D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 p.
Date: 2012-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-dem, nep-evo and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published by:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/1349 ... ITTE-arethesmart.pdf 2012-050-BRYUNEEL_CHERCHYE_COSAERT_DEROCK_DEWITTE-arethesmart (application/pdf)

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:eca:wpaper:2013/134951

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/134951

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().