Marco Piovesan (University of Copenhagen)

“The Development of Non-Standard Preferences”

Abstract: Are economic preferences an innate and specific characteristic of each human being or are they learnt through socialization? This fundamental question on nature or nurture has attracted the attention of developmental psychologist and, more recently, also of economists. For this project, we run a series of large scale economic experiments with approximately 800 children and adolescents (from 5 to 18 year-old) to elicit time preferences, risk preferences, altruism, trust, positive and negative reciprocity. Moreover, we ask parents to answer a survey designed to measure the same preferences and we elicit children network of friends within their class. The complexity of our unique dataset will allow us to 1) study the development of preferences with age; 2) investigate if there is a correlation between the development of different types of preferences; 3) discover the role of parents and friends on preferences and their heterogeneity.