Personality, Preferences, and Reference-Dependence

Description du projet

Intégrer la personnalité dans la méthodologie économique

Le domaine de l’économie s’intéresse de plus en plus à la pertinence des traits de personnalité pour expliquer les facteurs de réussite ou d’échec financier. Cependant, ces concepts de personnalité basés sur la psychologie ne sont pas bien adaptés au développement de modèles économiques standard; ils entravent donc la capacité des économistes à prédire et à évaluer les résultats économiques. Financé par le Conseil européen de la recherche, le projet Pers_and_Preferences entend efficacement intégrer l’étude de la personnalité dans la méthodologie économique standard. Pour commencer, le projet fournira des définitions claires des traits de personnalité importants en termes de concepts économiques fondamentaux (préférences) et établira ensuite des indices pour mesurer leur intensité. Enfin, Pers_and_Preferences testera la validité de ces nouvelles définitions économiques et les comparera aux études empiriques déjà réalisées.

Objectif

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.