| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w23057 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 23057 |
| The Quest for Parsimony in Behavioral Economics: New Methods and Evidence on Three Fronts | |
| Victor Stango; Joanne Yoong; Jonathan Zinman | |
| 发表日期 | 2017-01-16 |
| 出版年 | 2017 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Behavioral economics identifies myriad deviations from classical economic assumptions about consumer decision-making, but lacks evidence on how its diverse phenomena fit together and whether they are amenable to modeling as low-dimensional constructs. We pursue such parsimony on three fronts, with success on two and instructive failure on the third. Elicitation parsimony reduces impediments to data collection by streamlining standard methods for directly measuring a person’s behavioral tendencies. We do so for 17 potentially behavioral factors per individual in a large, nationally representative sample, and several sets of results indicate that our streamlined elicitations yield low-cost, high-quality data. Behavioral sufficient statistic parsimony aggregates information across behavioral factors, within-person, to create two new lower-dimensional, consumer-level measures of behavioral tendencies. These statistics usefully capture cross-sectional variation in behavioral tendencies, strongly and negatively correlating with a rich index of financial condition even after (over-)controlling for demographics, classical risk attitudes and patience, cognitive skills including financial literacy, and survey effort. Our quest for common factor parsimony largely fails: within-consumer correlations between behavioral factors tend to be low, and the common factor contributing to all 17 behavioral factors within-individual is weakly identified and does not help explain outcomes conditional on the other covariates. Altogether our results provide many new insights into behavioral factors: their distributions, inter-relationships, distinctions from classical factors, and links to outcomes. Our findings also support the two leading approaches to modeling behavioral factors—considering them in relative isolation, and summarizing them with reduced-form sufficient statistics—and provide data and methods for honing both approaches. |
| 主题 | Microeconomics ; Behavioral Economics ; Households and Firms ; Welfare and Collective Choice ; Economics of Information ; Macroeconomics |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w23057 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/580731 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Victor Stango,Joanne Yoong,Jonathan Zinman. The Quest for Parsimony in Behavioral Economics: New Methods and Evidence on Three Fronts. 2017. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w23057.pdf（971KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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