IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-01992420.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Positional concerns and framing effects in financial preferences

Author

Listed:
  • Assia Houfaf Khoufaf

    (ENSM - Ecole nationale supérieure de management - pôle universitaire Koléa - Ecole nationale supérieure de management - pôle universitaire Koléa)

  • Latifa Barbara

    (MDI Alger Business School)

  • Gilles G. Grolleau

    (LAMETA - Laboratoire Montpelliérain d'Économie Théorique et Appliquée - UM1 - Université Montpellier 1 - UPVM - Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - Montpellier SupAgro - Centre international d'études supérieures en sciences agronomiques - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier, CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier, BSB - Burgundy School of Business (BSB) - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Dijon Bourgogne (ESC))

  • Assia Houfaf Khoufaf
  • Youcef Meriane

    (ENSM - Ecole nationale supérieure de management - pôle universitaire Koléa - Ecole nationale supérieure de management - pôle universitaire Koléa)

  • Naoufel Mzoughi

    (ECODEVELOPPEMENT - Unité de recherche d'Écodéveloppement - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique)

Abstract

We examine the relevance of relative standings in the financial domain. We introduced innovative hypotheses by testing whether framing (gain versus loss, risk level, amounts versus percentage, and money origin) affects stated positional preferences. Based on a quasi-experimental survey in Algeria (North Africa), our results show that while egalitarian concerns are prevalent in financial preferences among participants, positional and absolute states are also selected by a significant proportion of respondents. We also found some support to the insight that positional preferences are affected by framing, since loss/gain and risk framings are found to be significant. In other words, the proportion of respondents having positional preferences was found to be significantly higher in the gain (respectively, risky) framing, compared to a symmetric loss (respectively, certain) situation.

Suggested Citation

  • Assia Houfaf Khoufaf & Latifa Barbara & Gilles G. Grolleau & Assia Houfaf Khoufaf & Youcef Meriane & Naoufel Mzoughi, 2018. "Positional concerns and framing effects in financial preferences," Post-Print hal-01992420, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01992420
    DOI: 10.1016/j.qref.2017.09.002
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://institut-agro-montpellier.hal.science/hal-01992420
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://institut-agro-montpellier.hal.science/hal-01992420/document
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.qref.2017.09.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Camerer, Colin F & Hogarth, Robin M, 1999. "The Effects of Financial Incentives in Experiments: A Review and Capital-Labor-Production Framework," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 19(1-3), pages 7-42, December.
    2. Salima Salhi & Gilles Grolleau & Naoufel Mzoughi & Angela Sutan, 2012. "How Can Positional Concerns Prevent the Adoption of Socially Desirable Innovations?," Journal of Economic Issues, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(3), pages 799-810.
    3. S. Wouters & N. Exel & M. Donk & K. Rohde & W. Brouwer, 2015. "Do people desire to be healthier than other people? A short note on positional concerns for health," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 16(1), pages 47-54, January.
    4. Ernst Fehr & Klaus M. Schmidt, 1999. "A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 817-868.
    5. Duflo, Esther & Saez, Emmanuel, 2002. "Participation and investment decisions in a retirement plan: the influence of colleagues' choices," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(1), pages 121-148, July.
    6. El Harbi, Sana & Bekir, Insaf & Grolleau, Gilles & Sutan, Angela, 2015. "Efficiency, equality, positionality: What do people maximize? Experimental vs. hypothetical evidence from Tunisia," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 77-84.
    7. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    8. Latifa Barbara & Gilles Grolleau & Naoufel Mzoughi, 2017. "Do You Prefer Having More or More than Others in the Workplace? A Quasi‐experimental Survey in Algeria," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 38(4), pages 595-606, June.
    9. Celse, Jérémy, 2012. "Is the positional bias an artefact? Distinguishing positional concerns from egalitarian concerns," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 277-283.
    10. Rubinstein, Ariel, 2001. "A theorist's view of experiments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(4-6), pages 615-628, May.
    11. Sara J. Solnick & David Hemenway, 2005. "Are Positional Concerns Stronger in Some Domains than in Others?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 147-151, May.
    12. Sarah E. Hill & David M. Buss, 2006. "Envy and positional bias in the evolutionary psychology of management," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(2-3), pages 131-143.
    13. J. Solnick, Sara & Hemenway, David, 1998. "Is more always better?: A survey on positional concerns," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 373-383, November.
    14. Loch, Christoph & Yaziji, Michael & Langen, Christian, 2001. "The fight for the alpha position:: Channeling status competition in organizations," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 16-25, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dib-Slamani, Hind & Grolleau, Gilles & Mzoughi, Naoufel, 2022. "Robbing a robber is not robbing," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 1-7.
    2. Fan, Wen & Zhang, Lifang, 2020. "Examining framing effect when subject's perspective matters: Evidence from China," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 35(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jérémy Celse, 2018. "Do You Enjoy Having More Than Others or More Than Another? Exploring the Relationship Between Relative Concerns and the Size of the Reference Group," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 138(3), pages 1089-1118, August.
    2. El Harbi, Sana & Bekir, Insaf & Grolleau, Gilles & Sutan, Angela, 2015. "Efficiency, equality, positionality: What do people maximize? Experimental vs. hypothetical evidence from Tunisia," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 77-84.
    3. Celse, Jérémy & Galia, Fabrice & Max, Sylvain, 2017. "Are (negative) emotions to blame for being positional? An experimental investigation of the impact of emotional states on status preferences," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 122-130.
    4. Jérémy Celse, 2009. "Will Joe the Plumber envy Bill Gates? The impact of both absolute and relative differences on interdependent preferences," Working Papers 09-26, LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier, revised Dec 2009.
    5. Graf, Lorenz & König, Andreas & Enders, Albrecht & Hungenberg, Harald, 2012. "Debiasing competitive irrationality: How managers can be prevented from trading off absolute for relative profit," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 386-403.
    6. Grolleau, Gilles & Ibanez, Lisette & Mzoughi, Naoufel, 2012. "Being the best or doing the right thing? An investigation of positional, prosocial and conformist preferences in provision of public goods," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 41(5), pages 705-711.
    7. Sergio Da Silva & Raul Matsushita & Vanessa Valcanover & Jessica Campara & Newton Da Costa, 2022. "Losses make choices nonpositional," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 2(11), pages 1-11, November.
    8. Amrei Lahno & Marta Serra-Garcia, 2015. "Peer effects in risk taking: Envy or conformity?," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 50(1), pages 73-95, February.
    9. Clément Bellet, 2017. "Essays on Inequality, Social Preferences and Consumer Behavior," Sciences Po publications info:hdl:2441/vbu6kd1s68o, Sciences Po.
    10. Lahno, Amrei M. & Serra-Garcia, Marta, 2012. "Peer Effects in Risk Taking," Discussion Papers in Economics 14309, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
    11. He, Haoran & Wu, Keyu, 2016. "Choice set, relative income, and inequity aversion: An experimental investigation," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 177-193.
    12. Clark, Andrew E. & D'Ambrosio, Conchita, 2014. "Attitudes to Income Inequality: Experimental and Survey Evidence," IZA Discussion Papers 8136, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Adam Ayaita & Kerstin Pull, 2022. "Positional preferences and narcissism: evidence from ‘money burning’ dictator games," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(3), pages 267-271, February.
    14. Jacobs Martin, 2016. "Accounting for Changing Tastes: Approaches to Explaining Unstable Individual Preferences," Review of Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 67(2), pages 121-183, August.
    15. Nickolas Gagnon & Riccardo D. Saulle & Henrik W. Zaunbrecher, 2021. "Decreasing Incomes Increase Selfishness," Papers 2107.02888, arXiv.org.
    16. Bogliacino, Francesco & Codagnone, Cristiano, 2021. "Microfoundations, behaviour, and evolution: Evidence from experiments," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 372-385.
    17. Gueye, Mamadou & Quérou, Nicolas & Soubeyran, Raphael, 2020. "Social preferences and coordination: An experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 173(C), pages 26-54.
    18. Eckerstorfer, Paul & Wendner, Ronald, 2013. "Asymmetric and non-atmospheric consumption externalities, and efficient consumption taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 42-56.
    19. S. Wouters & N. Exel & M. Donk & K. Rohde & W. Brouwer, 2015. "Do people desire to be healthier than other people? A short note on positional concerns for health," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 16(1), pages 47-54, January.
    20. David Card & Alexandre Mas & Enrico Moretti & Emmanuel Saez, 2012. "Inequality at Work: The Effect of Peer Salaries on Job Satisfaction," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(6), pages 2981-3003, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    positional concerns; Algeria; financial preferences; framing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D0 - Microeconomics - - General
    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01992420. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.