Analysis code for "Linking Social and Personal Preferences: Theory and Experiment"

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Authors: William R. Zame, Bertil Tungodden, Erik Ø. Sørensen, Shachar Kariv, Alexander W. Cappelen
Cited by: 0

Abstract

The attitudes of a Decision Maker toward riskless and risky choices—both personal choices and social choices—enter virtually every realm of individual decision-making. This paper asks when it is possible to link these attitudes. We provide a simple formalization of this question and necessary and sufficient conditions that such a link exists. We also offer an experimental test of the theory in which subjects were confronted with choices (involving monetary outcomes) in three domains: risky personal choices, riskless social choices and risky social choices. Revealed preference tests show that subject choices are generally consistent with utility maximization within each choice domain but frequently involve at least some errors. We test for consistency across choice domains using a novel nonparametric revealed preference test that accounts for these errors. The master file this replication package will: 1. Install the required versions of the necessary `R` packages from CRAN. 2. Downloads the necessary datafile from Harvard Dataverse. 3. Create all the displays in the paper as separate files (documented below). 4. Create markdown documents for numbers referenced in the paper but not explicitly part of produced tables.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies Economic and Environmental Valuation

Publication details

Journal / source
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Publication date
10 February 2026
Language
EN