Personality, Preferences, and Reference-Dependence

Descripción del proyecto

Integrar la personalidad en la metodología económica

El interés por la relevancia de los rasgos de personalidad para explicar los factores del éxito o el fracaso financiero ha aumentado de forma considerable en el ámbito de la economía. Sin embargo, estos conceptos de personalidad basados en la psicología no se ajustan bien al desarrollo de modelos económicos convencionales, por lo que obstaculizan la capacidad de los economistas para predecir y evaluar los resultados económicos. En el proyecto Pers_and_Preferences, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, se pretende integrar de forma práctica el estudio de la personalidad en la metodología económica convencional. Para ello, en primer lugar, se elaborarán definiciones claras de rasgos de la personalidad importantes en términos de conceptos económicos fundamentales (preferencias) y, después, se desarrollarán índices para medir su intensidad. Por último, se probará la validez de estas nuevas definiciones económicas y se compararán con los estudios empíricos disponibles.

Objetivo

In recent years, the study of personality (noncognitive skills) has significantly increased in economics. There has been an explosion of empirical work that shows the promise and relevance of incorporating such factors into the field. But we lack a definition of relevant personality traits in terms of primitive preferences, the way we do with risk and time preferences, for instance. Most studies rely on self-reported surveys, but this is only part of the issue: without a sharp, agreed-upon definition, it is difficult to build models, make predictions or elicit these measures in a way that unambiguously separates the primitives from the outcomes. My aim is to provide these notions.

Part 1 focuses on attitudes towards success and failure, and the thresholds that separate one from the other. Such attitudes are not only present in the way we discuss personality (e.g. perseverance and tenacity), they also appear in seemingly distant strands of economics, notably through the widely used notion of gain-loss sensitivity, notions of aspirations, etc. Within a standard decision theoretic setting, we define such attitudes as features of the primitive preferences over lotteries, we characterize the corresponding utility representations, and provide indices of the intensity of each attitude, in a manner analogous to the Arrow-Pratt coefficients for risk-aversion.

These notions have crucial implications on two main levels: first, they generate testable predictions for choice under risk, and novel insights about central notions within the established economics toolkit; second, they expand the domain of economics methodology to the study of personality, by providing choice-based measures grounded on preferences, thereby bridging the gap between insightful notions from psychology and the desiderata of rigorous economic analysis. These two aspects are the focus of Parts 2 and 3, respectively, which tackle the problem through a series of large-scale experiments.