Revising Commitments: Field Evidence on the Adjustment of Prior Choices
By X. Giné, Jessica Goldberg, Dan Silverman, Dean Yang. 2012
146 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The very poor in developing countries often make intertemporal choices that seem at odds with their individual self-interest. There are many possible reasons why. This paper investigates several of these reasons with a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Malawi involving large stakes. It makes two contributions. First, it constructs a new dependent variable: revisions of prior choices regarding the allocation of future income. This allows us to directly examine intertemporal choice revision and its determinants. In particular, this dependent variable permits a novel test for the existence of self-control problems. It turns out revisions of money allocations toward the present are positively associated with measures of present-bias from an earlier baseline survey, as well as the (randomly assigned) closeness in time to the first possible date of money disbursement. Second, the paper investigates other potential determinants of revision, aside from self-control problems. It finds little evidence that revisions of money allocations toward the present are associated with spousal preferences for such revision, household shocks or the financial sophistication of respondents.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea12c2b7542f1a7dd6ddf5f2fae1e43cfea08708
Citations in the corpus
- Facilitating Savings for Agriculture: Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi (2015, unknown): “Giné et al. ð2013Þ find that Malawian farmers with present-biased preferences are more likely to revise a plan about how to use future income, a result that supports the potential of commitment accounts to improve welfare for those with self-control problems.”
- Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence From Field Experiments (2020, unknown): “, LaPorte and Nath, 1976, Schunk, 1983, Schunk, 1984, Schunk and Rice, 1991, Schunk and Swartz, 1993, Schunk, 1996, and Griffee and Templin, 1997). There are important differences between teacher-set goals for grade-school-aged children and self-set goals for college students: first, college student”