Collaborative Research: Measuring Preference Stability and Change: A Panel Study

概述社会科学家和政策制定者依靠对人的假设？S的偏好来解释人类行为。偏好被认为是稳定的、可衡量的，并可预测经济和社会的成功。例如，当一项政策被设计成让人们为未来储蓄时，我们就会对公民对未来的贴现偏好做出假设。我们有衡量人们对未来的重视程度的指标，我们依赖这些指标来为政策提供信息。问题是，我们不知道这些措施是否有效或可靠。它们能预测个人做出的重大人生选择吗？同样的问题也适用于在制定公共政策时使用的许多偏好衡量标准。这个项目的目的是开发准确且简单易用的偏好测量方法，并预测行为。技术概述人们的偏好被认为是稳定的、可衡量的，并预示着经济、社会和政治上的成功。与风险、时间折扣(或耐心)、利他主义、信任、互惠和竞争相关的偏好为投资、储蓄、慈善捐赠和志愿服务、集体决策、投票和公民参与或职业选择等领域的决策模型提供了基础。尽管偏好是社会科学的关键概念，但事实证明，它们很难衡量。我们利用一个自然的实验，将学生随机分配到四年制寄宿大学，以实现三个目标。首先，我们将校准常用的偏好测量，并测试其可靠性和效度。第二，我们将衡量偏好稳定性。我们的研究允许我们测量相同个体随着时间的推移的偏好，以努力衡量他们是否保持稳定。偏好稳定性是社会科学的核心主张，但我们对哪些偏好是稳定的知之甚少。第三，我们将把偏好与结果对应起来。通过使用五年来跟踪的一组受试者，我们可以确定哪些偏好衡量标准可以预测公民参与、竞争行为、学业和就业成功等结果。

General SummarySocial scientists and policy makers rely on assumptions about people?s preferences to explain human behavior. Preferences are thought to be stable, measureable and predictive of economic and social success. For example when a policy is designed to get people to save for the future we make assumptions about citizens' preferences for discounting the future. We have measures that approximate how much people value the future and we rely on those measures to inform policy. The problem is that we do not know whether those measures are either valid or reliable. Do they predict the significant life choices that individuals make? The same problem holds for many measures of preference that are used when making public policy. The aim of this project is to develop measures of preference that will be accurate and simple to use, and that will predict behavior. Technical SummaryHuman preferences are assumed to be stable, measurable and predictive of economic, social and political success. Preferences related to risk, time discounting (or patience), altruism, trust, reciprocity, and competition provide the underpinnings for models of decision-making in arenas as diverse as investment, savings, charitable giving and volunteering, collective decision making, voting and civic engagement, or the choice of a profession. While preferences are key constructs for the social sciences, they have proven difficult to measure. We make use of a natural experiment, random assignment of students to four-year residential colleges, to accomplish three objectives. First, we will calibrate commonly used measures of preference and test for their reliability and validity. Second, we will measure preference stability. Our study allows us to measure preferences over time with the same individuals in an effort to gauge whether they remain stable. Preference stability is a central claim in the social sciences, yet we know little about which preferences are stable. Third, we will map preferences to outcomes. By using a panel of subjects tracked over five years we can identify which measures of preference predict outcomes like civic engagement, competitive behavior, and academic and employment success.