Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía (2ª planta del Edificio Los Madroños). 

Ponente: Pablo Brañas (Loyola Behavioral Lab, Universidad Loyola Andalucía)

Título: "Running experiments with teenagers: Challenges and some results"

Abstract: 

«There is an increasing interest in how to conduct experiments with teenagers by economists. This talk evaluates whether different methodological factors impact the answers of teenagers to standard experimental tasks measuring tools preferences, risk preferences, cognitive abilities and financial abilities. Results show that incentivizing subjects with hypothetical payments elicits similar results than real payments. We also find that an interface asking subjects to choose between options increases the quality of answers, and that adding a visual aspect to this interface further improves the quality of answers by subjects. We also find that the type of electronic device on which subjects answer the task and that administrating the experiment by teachers does not influence results.

The second part of this talk reports evidence on teenagers decision-making. A large and powered sample of n=2467 subjects completed several well-known tasks in a lab-in-the-field experiment: time preferences (MPL), reflective abilities (CRT), financial abilities (Fin), risk preferences (Holt-Laury) and probability abilities (Delavande). Results show that teenagers answer rapidly and with high consistency time and risk preferences tasks that are adapted to them by using visualization. The quality of their answers increase with age and their preferences remain stable across age. They also obtain good results in the cognitive abilities questionnaires, but their performance is sensible to the difficulty of the question. We observe little gender differences in the experiment. We also find that time and risk preferences are not correlated, and that cognitive abilities play a critical role in increasing consistency and influencing preferences.»