Dynamic Preference "Reversals" and Time Inconsistency
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This paper studies social learning and information pooling within the household using a lab experiment with 400 married couples in Chennai, India. Participants are asked to guess the fraction of red balls in an urn after each spouse privately receives draws from the urn and then has a chance to learn their spouse’s draws through a face-to-face discussion. Guesses are paid for accuracy and the payoff is split equally between the spouses, aligning their incentives. We find that husbands’ beliefs respond less than half as much to information that was collected by their wives, relative to ‘own’ information. This failure of learning is not due to communication frictions: when we directly share their wife’s information with husbands, they continue to under-weight it relative to their own draws. Wives do not display this behavior, and instead equally weight their own and their spouse’s information. In a follow-up experiment with pairs of strangers, individuals of both genders put more weight on their own information than on their partner’s. We conclude that people have a general tendency to under-weight others’ information relative to their own, and speculate that a norm of wives deferring to their husbands may play a countervailing role in our context.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 9, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Strack, Philipp |
|---|---|
| Author | Taubinsky, Dmitry |
| Organizer of meeting | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Organizer of meeting | Beshears, John |
| Organizer of meeting | Crawford, Vincent |
| Organizer of meeting | Laibson, David |
| Organizer of meeting | Malmendier, Ulrike |
Subjects
| Subject | economics |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Working paper |
| Genre | Grey literature |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Strack, P. and Taubinsky, D. (2022). Dynamic Preference "Reversals" and Time Inconsistency. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/gt972dz8735
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SITE Conference 2021
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