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The aim of this study was to understand how hierarchical leisure constraints prohibited sport participation and influenced sport preferences during individuals' adolescent years, and how these constraint effects may change during their early twenties. A sequential explanatory mixed methods design was employed to (1) identify general changes in constraint effects on participation and then to (2) better understand how sport preferences may be impacted by these constraint effects. A sample (n=117) of female (n=36) and male (n=81) Georgia residents between the ages of 20-25 participated in the study. Twelve of the participants were interviewed following their completion of the online questionnaire. Survey data were analyzed using two-tailed dependent sample t-tests, while the interviews were analyzed through a reflective thematic analysis. Findings from analyses suggest that interpersonal and structural constraints are likely to become slightly more difficult to negotiate as individuals transition from adolescence into young adulthood and that their sport participation choices and overall sport preferences are unlikely to change significantly. In situations where sport preference and participation changes occur, individuals' changes often reflect their ability to relate to their new sport or sports through prior skills or knowledge that could be carried over from their adolescent sport participation. Keywords: sport participation; adolescence; hierarchical leisure constraints; theory of planned behavior; mixed methods; socialization, Sport participation serves as a leisure form of physical activity, which can improve musculoskeletal health, control body weight, and reduce the symptoms of depression, while also decreasing the likelihood of [...]

Empirical demonstrations that people's behavior often deviates from predictions of models based on the assumption of coherent preferences highlight the possibility that people's choices systematically misrepresent what they genuinely want. Thus, the concept of welfare as preference satisfaction becomes more questionable than ever. The essay addresses the alternative to neoclassical welfare economics proposed by the libertarian paternalists. It shows the centrality of the idea of 'true preferences' for the libertarian paternalist program. However, the existing proposals on how to uncover true preferences are found lacking. This effectively undercuts the idea that the government could intervene in a transparent, non-arbitrary fashion to correct 'behavioral market failures.' The essay concludes with a plea to the benevolent policy-makers to retain a humble, skeptical attitude towards the use of tools of psychological manipulation which is legitimized by vague welfare criteria., Author(s): Petr Specián [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0001 1956 7785, grid.266283.b, Faculty of Economics, University of Economics, Prague, , W. Churchill Sq. 1938/4, 130 67, Prague 3, Zizkov, Czech [...]

Many studies show that time preference data from experiments and surveys are related to field behavior. Time preference measures in these studies typically depend simultaneously on utility curvature, the level of impatience, and the change in the level of impatience. Thus, these studies do not allow one to establish which of these three components drive(s) the field behavior of interest. Of these components, the change in the level of impatience is theoretically thought to be the main driver of time inconsistencies and self-control problems. To test this theoretical presumption, one has to measure the change in the level of impatience independently from utilities and levels of impatience. This paper introduces a measure of the degree of decreasing impatience, the DI-index. It measures the change of impatience independently from the level of impatience and independently from utility. It can also be used to test various discounting models. An experiment finds no correlation between the degree of decreasing impatience and self-reported self-control problems in daily life, suggesting that changing impatience is not the sole driver of self-control problems. History: Accepted by Manel Baucells, decision analysis. Funding: Erasmus Research Institute of Management provided financial support. Supplemental Material: Data and the supplementary material are available at https://doi.org/ 10.1287/mnsc.2017.3015. Keywords: decreasing impatience * hyperbolic discounting * intertemporal choice, 1. Introduction Virtually any decision we make involves future consequences. Individuals are often inconsistent when making such decisions. They tend to make plans for the future to which they do [...]

We present a lab-field experiment designed to systematically assess the external validity of social preferences elicited in a variety of experimental games. We do this by comparing behavior in the different games with several behaviors elicited in the field and with self-reported behaviors exhibited in the past, using the same sample of participants. Our results show that the experimental social preference games do a poor job explaining both social behaviors in the field and social behaviors from the past. We also include a systematic review and meta-analysis of previous literature on the external validity of social preference games. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Funding: M. M. Galizzi gratefully acknowledges funding from the Economic and Social Research Council [Future Research Leader Fellowship ES/K001965/1], D. Navarro-Martinez acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [MINECO-PSI2013-41909-P]. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2908. Keywords: field behavior * external validity * experimental games * social preferences, 1. Introduction The last few decades have seen a strong surge of interest in what is now widely known in economics as 'social preferences.' While the study of social behaviors [...]

With the increasing numbers of Facebook fan-page users, finding information based on their interests has become difficult, and fan-page managers are challenged as they try to understand the needs of these users. To understand their needs and preferences and increase the effectiveness of fan-page marketing, we use two-step clustering to group 42,953 Facebook fan-page users. The results of our study show seven clusters, each with different key characteristics. We label them as lurk, informational, health and beauty, visual lady, intellectual reader, consumption and shopping, and highly active fans. One of our objectives in this paper is to help fan-page managers use our results to target users and to draft management strategies. History: This paper was refereed. This paper has been accepted for the special issue on Applications of Analytics and Operations Research in Big Data Analysis. Keywords: behavior * social network * Information, Introduction Facebook, with 1.366 billion active users each month (Kemp 2015), is the social network with the greatest number of users. The numbers of Facebook users are continually increasing in [...]

Librarians from Purdue University wanted to determine which social media platforms students use, which platforms they would like the library to use, and what content they would like to see [...]

ESSAY CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. THE PROBLEM OF BEHAVIORAL PREFERENCE IDENTIFICATION A. Setup: Nudges and Frames B. The Optimal Choice of Frame C. Limitations of the Traditional Approach II. EXISTING METHODS [...], Behavioral Law and Economics has created a dilemma for policymakers. On the one hand, research from the field suggests a wide range of unconventional policy instruments ("nudges") may be used to shape people's voluntary choices in order to lead them to the option they most prefer. On the other hand, the very nature of these new instruments precludes researchers from measuring people's preferences in the traditional way, i.e., by evaluating which option people choose from the set of available choices. As a result, policymakers often lack the information they need to design nudges that will make people better off. To tackle this dilemma, I propose a new framework that focuses on the distinction between those decision makers who respond to nudges and those who do not. The framework highlights that existing methods for designing nudges come up short-none accounts for what I argue is the crucial piece of information: the preferences of the nudge-sensitive decisionmakers. After exploring this dilemma, the Essay describes two new approaches for uncovering the preferences of this group and argues that they hold promise for informing the design of nudges in a wide range of policy settings.

Participants in dictator games frequently avoid learning whether their choice to maximize their own earnings will help or hurt the recipient and then choose selfishly, exploiting the 'moral wiggle room' provided by their ignorance. However, this is found in an environment in which the dictator must actively learn the true payoffs, so inaction means ignorance. Does this effect persist when one must actively choose either to be ignorant or to be informed or when one must actively choose to remain ignorant? In fact, whereas 45% of dictators remain ignorant when one must click to become informed, this drops to 25% when one must click in either case and to 3% when one must click to remain ignorant. Although the exploitation of moral wiggle room is not merely an artifact, it is, much like social behavior itself, subject to environmental and psychological factors that may reinforce or undermine its impact. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1989. Keywords: social preferences; strategic ignorance; moral wiggle room; default effects; status quo bias; self-deception; self-signaling; dictator games History: Received August 28, 2013; accepted April 6, 2014, by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Published online in Articles in Advance September 11, 2014., 1. Introduction Participants in experiments regularly give up money to help anonymous recipients. To the extent that social preferences influence economic behavior in the field, *they should shape our understanding [...]

We conduct public goods experiments in which participant groups are heterogeneous in regards to the source of their endowments. We find that this dimension of heterogeneity significantly reduces contributions to the public good, yielding strong support for the Nash prediction of minimal contributions. These minimal contributions arise in environments in which there exists a clear minority in terms of source of endowments. We discuss these results in light of current research on the influence of heterogeneous populations on public goods provision and redistributive policies. (JEL C9, D63, H4, J15), I. INTRODUCTION There is extensive evidence that heterogeneous populations invest less in social capital. For example, Alesina and Ferrara (2000) find that participation in social activities is lower in racially [...]

In addition to showing that student measures of social preference, a concern for outcomes achieved by other reference agents, are quite different from those obtained in the field with participants who face social dilemmas in their daily lives, we find links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the field stock of social preferences evolves endogenously with respect to how widely team production is utilized. Because the link between productivity and social preference is strong, we provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take notice of social preferences. (JEL C93, D21, D24, H41, J24, M52, Z13), I. INTRODUCTION Laboratory experiments in economics have provided overwhelming evidence that many student participants exhibit social preferences: they care about the outcomes achieved by reference agents in addition to their [...]

We study the minimal contributing set (MCS) game, a three-person sequential step-level public goods game. The behavior of critical third players changes with experience in this game even though they face no strategic or payoff' uncertainty. We explore why these changes occur by manipulating subjects' experience in the first half of the experiment. The treatments give subjects very different initial experiences, but all treatments move subjects' choices toward experienced subjects' play in the control sessions. Long-run play is indistinguishable across treatments. Our results are more consistent with the 'discovered preferences' hypothesis (Plott 1996) than either the 'constructed preference' or 'reference point' hypotheses. (JEL H41, C72, C92), I. INTRODUCTION Over the past three decades experimental economics has identified a number of settings where players in noncooperative games make choices that are inconsistent with maximizing their own monetary [...]

Rational choice presupposes that people do what they like better than any available alternative, If, however, we mistrust what they declare to like or what psychology is supposed to tell [...]

Support for three hypotheses on the qualities that parents look for in sons or daughters-in-law are discussed. It is hypothesized that parents desire qualities that benefit them and their kin, that preferences rely on the gender of the in-law, and that in-law preferences differ according to the type of society.

The role of social preferences and beliefs for the decline in voluntary cooperation is examined. Free riding increases in repeatedly played public goods experiments across various parameters and participant pools. The results show that contributions decline because, on average, people are imperfect conditional cooperators who match others' contributions only partly.

A study to collect risk and time preferences of individuals experimentally is presented. The preferences are correlated with demographic and economic variables from the previous Vietnam household survey. The results indicated people living in poor villages are averse to loss of income but not necessarily afraid of income variation.

A study on the economics of match formation using a novel data set from a major online dating service is discussed. The mate preferences were estimated using data on user attributes and interactions from the site and the Gale-Shapley algorithm was used to predict stable matches. The findings show that mate preferences can generate sorting in marriages.

Comparative research on the preferred sex of children in Western societies has generally focused on women only and ignored the role of gender equity and the need for children's economic support in old age. A multilevel analysis extends existing research by examining, for both men and women and across 24 European countries, the effect of the preferred sex-composition of offspring on whether parents have or intend to have a third child. Using the European Social Survey (2004/5), a multilevel (random coefficient) ordered logit regression of that intention (N = 3,323) and a binary logistic multilevel model of the transition to a third child (N = 6,502) demonstrate the presence of a mixed-sex preference. In countries with a high risk of poverty in old age, a preference for sons is found, particularly for men. In societies where there is lower gender equity, both men and women have a significant preference for boys. Keywords: fertility; children; parents; gender; sex-composition; equality; equity; Europe [Submitted 29 January 2009; Final version accepted 26 October 2009] DOI: 10.1080/00324720903497081

A general methodology that can be used to in estimating heterogeneous preferences in situations of discrete choice under risk. Requirements include such that the existing heterogeneity can be summarized in a one-dimensional parameter, and that some exogenous source of variation should exist in the menus faced by the agents.

The study examines the housing preferences of elderly people in Spain and findings show that people, as they grow older, increasingly prefer to 'age in place.' Less affluent and disabled elderly prefer to 'age in place' and stay with relatives, while affluent ones prefer care centers. Implications for housing initiatives are also discussed.

We propose a two-sided method to simultaneously estimate men's and women's preferences for relative age, education, and religious characteristies of potential mates using cross-sectional data on married couples and single individuals, in conjunction with a behavioral model developed in game theory and discuete choice estimation methods developed for simpler, one-sided choice situations. We use fixed effects to control for characteristics that are observed by the opposite sex but are missing from our data. Estimated mean preference coefficients determine the average degree to which measured characteristics of individuals affect others' evaluations of them as marital partners, whereas the model also accounts for variation of preferences around the means and for limitations in men's and women's information about members of the opposite sex. By assuming that each individual chooses freely from the set of potential partners that he or she finds available, we estimate preferences without have to observe these sets or specify any details of the matching process. This makes our method robust to unknown features of the process. Application of the method to data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households indicates roughly symmetric or complementary preferences of men and women for age. education, and religious affiliation characteristics of potential mates and a much stronger preference for religious homogamy among conservative Protestants relative to mainline Protestants than was suggested by an earlier, retrospective study of religious differences in he temporal stability of marriages. Our method should be useful in many situations in which voluntary pairings have arisen through some complex process, the details of which have not been recorded. Besides marriage and cohabitation, data on employment, college attendance, and the coresidence of elderly parents with adult children often have this character, as do some biological data on nonhuman mating. KEY WORDS: Data augmentatuin; Fixed effects; Markov chain Monte Carlo; Marriage model; Mate preferences; National Survey of Families and Households; Religious homogamy; Two-sided logit; Two-sided matching; Two-sided probit.

The study examines a social preferences framework to explain the crowding-out phenomena with the conformists' preferences in relation to the people's preferences. Findings show that high incentives may crowd out motivation or trust as pessimism takes place, but that credible signals from principal can generate trust in conformist agents.

Preference for noninstrumental information may result from a preference for an early settlement of uncertainty, yearning to know the odds faced, and wanting to feel confident while making a decision. An experiment shows that people's willingness to pay for information rises significantly when it is offered before the making a guess. The demand for noninstrumental information is examined further.

Asset prices and portfolio holdings in an environment where likelihood to be optimistic about investments is moderated by the ex post costs of portfolio decisions based on incorrect beliefs are investigated. Results indicate that people want to believe in what makes them happy and that they like to make decisions that would result in good outcomes. Preference for skewness of returns is also analyzed.