谁更理性?(who is more rational?)发表于American Economic Review 2014年第6期。
Abstract
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.