Abstract

Over recent decades, the literature has increasingly recognized that individual decision-making reflects a complex set of preferences extending beyond traditional economic assumptions, including cognitive biases, social norms, and environmental considerations. Accurately assessing all these preferences remains a key empirical challenge. We first develop a unified framework to jointly estimate time, risk, social, and environmental preferences using incentivized choice experiments, extending the approach of Ida and Goto (2009). We use variation in students’ relative income before and after stipend payments to study the relationship between cash-fluctuation effects and preferences, providing both substantive insights and a test of our method’s robustness against standard survey results (Falk et al., 2018) in a decontextualized classroom experiment setting. We then adapt the protocol to study how seasonal scarcity affects decision-making in the context of a conservation program used to encourage behavior change amongst rice farmers in Madagascar. We examine farmer’s preferences to engage in a Payment for Environmental Services (PES) scheme in the context of their risk and time preferences, as well as on their social and environmental preferences. By collecting data both before and after harvest, we are able to study how seasonal scarcity affects preferences and willingness to engage in a realistic but hypothetical PES scheme.

Practical information