Increasing the external validity of social preference games by reducing measurement error

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wang, Xinghua; Navarro-Martinez, Daniel
• 署名单位: Dongbei University of Finance & Economics; Pompeu Fabra University; Barcelona School of Economics
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2023.06.006
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 261-285
• 关键词: Social preference games; External validity; Field behavior; measurement error; aggregation; Day reconstruction method

摘要

An increasing number of studies call into question the external validity of social preference games. In this paper, we show that these games have a low correlation with single pro-social behaviors in the field, but this correlation can be substantially increased by aggregating behaviors to reduce measurement error. We tracked people's daily pro-social behaviors for 14 days using a day reconstruction method; the same people played three different social preference games on seven different occasions. We show that, as more pro-social behaviors and game rounds are aggregated, the games become much better predictors of pro-sociality. This predictive power is further increased by using statistical methods designed to better account for measurement error. These findings suggest that social preference games capture important underlying dispositions of real-world pro sociality, and they can be successfully used to predict aggregated pro-social inclinations. This has crucial implications for the external validity and applicability of economic games.& COPY; 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/).