HERU Seminar - Professor Morten Raun Mørkbak

HERU Seminar - Professor Morten Raun Mørkbak
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This is a past event

The frist of three seminars by COHERE staff and students this session is from Professor Morten Raun Mørkbak, Associate Professor, Department of Business and Economics, COHERE, University of Southern Denmark, Odense.

Title/topic: Incentivized vs. stated intertemporal choices and real physical effort tasks - a cross domain study of individual time preferences.

Abstract:Studies have highlighted that individuals might discount different goods differently. Individuals might be impatient when it comes to consumption of entertainment, but patient when it comes to future health. On the other hand discount rates based on health is harder to grasp and can be measured with error as individuals are not accustomed to deciding explicitly about now and the future in the health context as they are in the monetary e.g. when putting money in the bank. Another central issue occurring when eliciting time preferences within a health domain is that researchers often/always have to sort to a hypothetical task, since ethical considerations hinder the use of incentivized health choices. Within the monetary domain, the literature shows mixed results on the use of incentivized versus hypothetical experiments on time preferences. But if time preferences are to be used as a real life screening instrument, the hypothetical time preference questions seems inevitable. Thus the objective of this study is to extend the current evidence on incentivized vs. hypothetical elicited time preferences across two different domains – a monetary domain and a physical effort task domain. Using a multiple price list setting, we conduct an experiment across four treatments – hypothetical monetary domain, incentivized monetary domain, hypothetical effort task domain, and incentivized effort task domain. Assuming a quasi-hyperbolic framework, our results showed significant differences between discount rates elicited within the monetary domain and the effort task domain, but not between the hypothetical settings and the incentivized treatments. Moreover, the results showed that the hypothetical monetary treatments made subjects behave as being on average more present biased, which was not the case for the other three treatments. Finally, the results show that subjects within the hypothetical monetary domain also are more risk seeking.

The seminar takes place from 12.30pm to 1.30pm.

Other HERU seminars are featured on the HERU External Seminars page.

Hosted by
Professor Marjon van der Pol
Venue
Rm 1:029, Polwarth Building