Time (In)Consistent Food Choice of Children and Teenagers

Tabea Bucher-Koenen () and Carsten Schmidt

No 11251, MEA discussion paper series from Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy

Abstract: We document an increasing capacity to resist temptation in a time consistent manner from children to teenagers. Competencies develop in two steps: From age 8 on many pupils naively plan and after age 12 successfully implement strategies to resist temptation. Our evidence comes from a food choice experiment that we conducted with comparable participant pools of elementary and high school pupils in 5 di fferent school years. We off er tangible choices in terms of apples and chocolate. On the first day pupils state their preference regarding tomorrows consumption and on the second day they pick one food item for immediate consumption. We fi nd that most of the 6 to 7 year olds consistently choose chocolate for future and immediate consumption. With pupils age 8 to 12 we observe an increase of time inconsistent behavior - pupils naively planning to consume an apple tomorrow and then choosing chocolate for immediate consumption. From age 14 on a larger share of pupils is sophisticated in the sense that they plan to and actually do consume an apple.

JEL-codes: C91 C93 D01 D03 D9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12-14
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://mea.mpisoc.mpg.de/uploads/user_mea_discussionpapers/1244_251-11.pdf (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:mea:meawpa:11251

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MEA discussion paper series from Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, Amalienstraße 33, 80799 München, Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Henning Frankenberger ().