Impatience and uncertainty: Experimental decisions predict adolescents? field behavior

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment. We relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found to be significant redictors of health related field behavior and saving decisions. In particular, more impatient children and adolescents are more likely to spend money on alcohol and cigarettes, have a higher body mass index (BMI) and are less likely to save money. Experimental measures for risk and ambiguity attitudes are only weak predictors of field behavior.experiments with children and adolescents; risk; ambiguity; time preferences; health status; savings; external validity; field behavior.

Economic behavior of children and adolescents - A first survey of experimental economics results

About 15 years ago, economic experiments with children and adolescents were considered as an extravagant niche of economic research. Since then, this type of research has exploded in scope and depth. It has become clear that studying the development of economic behavior and its determinants is important to understand economic behavior of adults and to provide a basis for potential policy interventions with respect to economic behavior in childhood and adolescence. Given the huge increase of papers, we provide the first overview of economic experiments with children and adolescents. We focus on the following aspects: rationality of choices, risk preferences, time preferences, social preferences, cooperation, and competitiveness. All of these aspects are analyzed with respect to the influence of age and gender, and we also consider the role of socio-economic status or interventions. (C) 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V

No myopic loss aversion in adolescents? - An experimental note

Myopic loss aversion (MLA) has been found to play a persistent role for investment behavior under risk. We study whether MLA is already present during adolescence. Quite surprisingly, we find no evidence of MLA in a sample of 755 adolescents. This finding is at odds with previous findings, and it might be explained by self-selection effects. In other dimensions, however, we are able to replicate stylized findings in our pool of adolescents, such that teams invest higher amounts than individuals and that women invest less than men. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Collective intertemporal decisions and heterogeneity in groups

Many important intertemporal decisions are made by groups rather than individuals. What happens to collective decisions when there is internal conflict about the tradeoff between present and future has not been thoroughly investigated so far. We study experimentally the causal effect of group members' heterogeneous payoffs from waiting on intertemporal choices. We find that three-person groups behave more patiently than individuals. This effect stems from the presence of at least one group member with a high payoff from waiting. We analyze additional treatments, group chat content, and survey data to uncover the mechanism through which heterogeneity in groups increases patience. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Cancelling out early age gender differences in competition: an analysis of policy interventions

We study the willingness to compete of 588 children and teenagers aged ten to seventeen. We replicate the gender difference in tournament entry choices usually found in the literature for adults. We then show that policy interventions like quotas and preferential treatment help to close down the gender gap without leading to losses in efficiency, during or after a tournament. Given that differences in competitive behavior are prevalent from an early age, the application of interventions to promote females in competitions may be desirable already at early ages to promote equal chances for women on labor markets later on

Cooperation and discrimination within and across language borders: Evidence from children in a bilingual city

We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether the affiliation to a specific language group affects behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game and leads to discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year old primary school children in the city of Meran, we find that cooperation generally increases with age, but that the gap between cooperation among in-group members and cooperation towards children speaking another language is considerable and develops with age. This gap is due to both in-group favoritism and language group discrimination. While the former is persistent across all age groups and both language groups and accounts for most of the discrimination observed, the latter only emerges in later years of primary school among children belonging to the German language group. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

How to measure time preferences in children: a comparison of two methods

We measure time preferences in a sample of 561 children aged 7-11 years. Using a within-subject design, we compare the behavior of our subjects using two distinct experimental measures of time preferences: a standard choice list with multiple decisions and a single choice time-investment-exercise requiring one decision only. We find that both measures yield very similar aggregate results, correlate significantly within subjects and can be explained by basically the same explanatory variables. Advantages and disadvantages of both measures are discussed. Our findings are relevant for the design of experiments to measure time preferences