Measuring Subjective Expectations in Developing Countries: A Critical Review and New Evidence

By Adeline Delavande, X. Giné, David J. McKenzie. 2009

407 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The majority of economic decisions taken by individuals are forward looking and thus involve their expectations of future outcomes. Understanding the expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial importance to designing and evaluating policies in health, education, finance, migration, social protection, and many other areas. However, the majority of developing country surveys are static in nature and do not contain information on the subjective expectations of individuals. Possible reasons given for not collecting this information include fears that poor, illiterate individuals do not understand probability concepts, that it takes far too much time to ask such questions, or that the answers add little value. This paper provides a critical review and new analysis of subjective expectations data from developing countries and refutes each of these concerns. The authors find that people in developing countries can generally understand and answer probabilistic questions, such questions are not prohibitive in time to ask, and the expectations are useful predictors of future behavior and economic decisions. The paper discusses the different methods being tried for eliciting such information, the key methodological issues involved, and the open research questions. The available evidence suggests that collecting expectations data is both feasible and valuable, suggesting that it should be incorporated into more developing country surveys.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fa76643458b2821bc727784e99c709af8507507

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Citations in the corpus

Eliciting Probabilistic Expectations with Visual Aids in Developing Countries: How Sensitive Are Answers to Variations in Elicitation Design? (2010, unknown): “When describing the subjective distributions, we exclude these four respondents.”
Financial Incentives as Signals: Experimental Evidence from the Recruitment of Village Promoters in Uganda (2019, methodology): “26The approach of using visual aids to represent probability units is common practice in the literature (Attanasio 2009; Delavande et al. 2011).”
Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, background): “However, best-practice recommendations, such as the use of visual interfaces, have been shown to mitigate some of these problems, even when working with low-literacy populations (Delavande, 2014; Delavande et al., 2011).”
Aspirations: An Approach to Measurement with Validation Using Ethiopian Data (2014, background): “Thus, several recent studies have attempted to assess the reliability of attitudinal data such as expectations or satisfaction with life measures, and their possible limitations (e.g., Manski, 2004; Krueger and Schkade, 2008; Delavalande et al., 2011).”
Experimentally Validated Survey Evidence on Individual Risk Attitudes in Rural Thailand (2013, result): “The resulting cautious optimism on the survey measure is also supported by more general findings on subjective expectation statements in developing countries as people understand probability concepts and give reliable responses (Delavande et al., 2010).”
A penny for your thoughts: a survey of methods for eliciting beliefs (2014, unknown): “Delavande et al. (2011) consider belief elicitation in studies with subjects in developing countries who may have low levels of numerical literacy. Gneiting and Raftery (2007) present a technical review of proper scoring rules, including a detailed discussion of decision theoretic foundations and st”
The Impact of Vocational Training for the Unemployed: Experimental Evidence from Turkey (2014, unknown): “Our baseline survey elicited subjective probabilistic expectations (Delavande et al, 2010) by asking participants what they thought was the percent chance they would be employed in one year if they were selected for ISKUR training, and if they were not.”