Poor and Rational: Decision-Making under Scarcity

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fehr, Dietmar; Fink, Gunther; Jack, B. Kelsey
• 署名单位: Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Basel; Swiss Tropical & Public Health Institute; University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/720466
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 2862-2897
• 关键词: market experience; prospect-theory; loss aversion; endowment; poverty; PSYCHOLOGY; ECONOMICS; SALIENCE; BEHAVIOR; time

摘要

We investigate the link between poverty and decision-making in a sample of farmers in Zambia, who were given the opportunity to exchange randomly assigned household items for alternative items of similar value. Analyzing a total of 5,842 trading decisions and leveraging multiple sources of variation in financial constraints, we show that exchange asymmetries decrease in magnitude when participants are more constrained. This result is robust to experimental procedures and is not mediated by changes in cognitive performance. Consistent with the interpretation that scarcity leads to more rational decisions by increasing the utility loss from forgone trading, we show that trading probabilities go up when the market value of the items is exogenously increased.