Title Paid and hypothetical time preferences are the same: lab, field and online evidence
Authors BRAÑAS GARZA, PABLO ERNESTO, JORRAT, DIEGO ANDRÉS, ESPÍN MARTÍN, ANTONIO MANUEL, Sánchez A.
External publication No
Means EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS
Scope Article
Nature Científica
JCR Quartile 2
SJR Quartile 1
JCR Impact 2.3
SJR Impact 2.293
Web https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85138962520&doi=10.1007%2fs10683-022-09776-5&partnerID=40&md5=ef57f8bf2674bd728cbfc668681b9ea8
Publication date 26/10/2022
Scopus Id 2-s2.0-85138962520
DOI 10.1007/s10683-022-09776-5
Abstract The use of real decision-making incentives remains under debate after decades of economic experiments. In time preferences experiments involving future payments, real incentives are particularly problematic due to between-options differences in transaction costs, among other issues. What if hypothetical payments provide accurate data which, moreover, avoid transaction cost problems? In this paper, we test whether the use of hypothetical or one-out-of-ten-participants probabilistic—versus real—payments affects the elicitation of short-term and long-term discounting in a standard multiple price list task. We analyze data from a lab experiment in Spain and well-powered field and online experiments in Nigeria and the UK, respectively (N = 2,038). Our results indicate that the preferences elicited using the three payment methods are mostly the same: we can reject that either hypothetical or one-out-of-ten payments change any of the four preference measures considered by more than 0.18 SD with respect to real payments. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Economic Science Association.
Keywords BRIS; Field; Hypothetical vs. real payoffs; Lab; Online experiments; Time preferences
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