Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/338297 
Year of Publication: 
2026
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 11631
Version Description: 
This Version: January 2026
Publisher: 
Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research - CESifo GmbH, Munich
Abstract: 
Recent work in economics has developed survey-based measures of economic preferences that are "experimentally" or "behaviorally validated." We scrutinize this approach focusing on the Global Preference Survey (Falk et al., 2018, 2023). Replicating their behavioral validation on almost 2,000 participants in five countries, China, Colombia, Iran, Kenya, and the US, we find that many items correlate significantly with behavior in incentivized choice experiments, but coefficients vary and are not always sizable. While hypothetical versions of an experiment consistently show the strongest correlations, qualitative self-assessments are also almost always among the best single-item modules predicting behavior in all countries. Within- and across-preference principal component analyses, as well as comparison in terms of predictive validity, suggest that qualitative self-assessments and behavioral measures capture distinct dimensions of the same latent construct of an economic preference, casting doubt on the use of one instrument as an easy substitute for the other.
Subjects: 
measurement
preferences
JEL: 
C83
C91
D01
Document Type: 
Working Paper
Appears in Collections:

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.