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Who Is (More) Rational?

2014; American Economic Association; Volume: 104; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1257/aer.104.6.1518

1944-7981

Syngjoo Choi, Shachar Kariv, Wieland Müller, Dan Silverman,

Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies

Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale experiment to test for consistency with utility maximization. Consistency scores vary markedly within and across socioeconomic groups. In particular, consistency is strongly related to wealth: A standard deviation increase in consistency is associated with 15–19 percent more household wealth. This association is quantitatively robust to conditioning on correlates of unobserved constraints, preferences, and beliefs. Consistency with utility maximization under laboratory conditions thus captures decision-making ability that applies across domains and influences important real-world outcomes. (JEL D12, D14, D81, D83, D91, G11)