Behavioral Biases are Temporally Stable / Victor Stango, Jonathan Zinman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stango, Victor.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Zinman, Jonathan.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27860.

NBER working paper series no. w27860

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

Social scientists often consider temporal stability when assessing the usefulness of a construct and its measures, but whether behavioral biases display such stability is relatively unknown. We estimate stability for 25 biases, in a nationally representative sample, using repeated elicitations three years apart. Bias level indicators are largely stable in the aggregate and within-person. Within-person intertemporal rank correlations imply moderate stability and increase dramatically when using other biases as instrumental variables. Additional results reinforce three key inferences: biases are stable, accounting for classical measurement error in bias elicitation data is important, and eliciting multiple measures of multiple biases is valuable.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2020.