We are very happy to start this year’s Ethics, Experiments and Economics (3E) seminar series 2025. The seminars are also sponsored by the Competence Center in Experimental and Participatory Research (EXPAR). The 3E seminar series is organized once a month and invites leading scholars to discuss their work on behavioral and experimental researcher (see program here).
__
About the event
Date
January 23rd 15.30-16.30 [CET]
__
Speaker
Prof. Michael Kosfeld (Goethe University Frankfurt)
__
Title & Abstract
Measuring Economic Preferences with Surveys and Behavioral Experiments
Developing reliable and practicable measures of economic preferences is a crucial task for empirical economic research with high value for both economic theory and applications. Here, we present results from a first comprehensive “behavioral validation analysis” of the Global Preference Survey Module (GPS) and the corresponding Preference Survey Module (PSM) developed by Falk et al. (2018, 2023) that have been widely used for the measurement and analysis of economic preferences on a global scale. Our key question is how well GPS and PSM models explain behavior in incentivized choice experiments in other countries than in the original validation in Germany, and to what extent survey items and modules developed from behavioral experiments in different countries and cultures resemble one another. Our current results which are based on experiments in three very diverse countries—China, Iran, and Kenya—show that many GPS and PSM survey items perform well in predicting behavior in incentivized choice experiments, with the exception of negative reciprocity in most countries, and many preference domains in Kenya. Still, the variation in the observed associations is substantial. Quantitative items, which are based on hypothetical choice experiments, are consistently selected into survey modules but the best qualitative items vary between countries. At the same time, the contribution in terms of explanatory power of these latter items is comparably lower. Our analysis provides a first empirical basis for the development of survey modules that reliably predict behavior in incentivized choice experiments and real-life situations across diverse countries and contexts. Additional results including principal component analysis and the prediction of real-life behavior highlight important gaps warranting further investigation in future research.
