PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Dean, Mark
AU  - Ortoleva, Pietro
TI  - The empirical relationship between nonstandard economic behaviors
AID  - 10.1073/pnas.1821353116
DP  - 2019 Aug 13
TA  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
PG  - 16262--16267
VI  - 116
IP  - 33
4099  - http://www.pnas.org/content/116/33/16262.short
4100  - http://www.pnas.org/content/116/33/16262.full
SO  - Proc Natl Acad Sci USA2019 Aug 13; 116
AB  - A large literature in behavioral and experimental economics has identified a long list of robust phenomena that are hard to explain within the classic model of economic choice. These are, however, typically analyzed independently. We study the joint distribution of 11 of the most prominent behaviors using an incentivized laboratory experiment involving undergraduate students. Our main aim is to provide empirical guidance in the construction of a unified, parsimonious model of economic behavior, an important step in integrating behavioral insights into broader economic and policy analysis. We find that some of these phenomena are strongly related to each other, while others are independent. This provides evidence in support of some of the proposed attempts at unification, but not others.We study the joint distribution of 11 behavioral phenomena in a group of 190 laboratory subjects and compare it to the predictions of existing models as a step in the development of a parsimonious, general model of economic choice. We find strong correlations between most measures of risk and time preference, between compound lottery and ambiguity aversion, and between loss aversion and the endowment effect. Our results support some, but not all attempts to unify behavioral economic phenomena. Overconfidence and gender are also predictive of some behavioral characteristics.