Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/202796 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 12450
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Can a short survey instrument reliably measure a range of fundamental economic preferences across diverse settings? We focus on survey questions that systematically predict behavior in incentivized experimental tasks among German university students (Becker et al. 2016) and were implemented among representative samples across the globe (Falk et al. 2018). This paper presents results of an experimental validation conducted among low-income individuals in Nairobi, Kenya. We find that quantitative survey measures - hypothetical versions of experimental tasks - of time preference, attitude to risk and altruism are good predictors of choices in incentivized experiments, suggesting these measures are broadly experimentally valid. At the same time, we find that qualitative questions - self-assessments - do not correlate with the experimental measures of preferences in the Kenyan sample. Thus, caution is needed before treating self-assessments as proxies of preferences in new contexts.
Subjects: 
preference measurement
experiment
survey
validation
JEL: 
C83
D90
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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