IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ifs/ifsewp/17-16.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Peer effects in risky choices among adolescents

Author

Listed:
  • Konstanting Lucks

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies)

  • Melanie Lührmann

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies and Royal Holloway, University of London)

  • Joachim K. Winter

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Abstract

We study the effects of peers on risky decision making among adolescents in the age range of 13 to 15 years. In a field experiment, we randomly allocated school classes to two social interaction treatments. Students were allowed to discuss their choices with a natural peer – either a friend or a randomly selected classmate – before individually making choices in an incentivised lottery task. In the control group, adolescents made choices without being able to discuss them with a peer. In addition, we collected information on existing peer networks. This novel design allows us to separate two channels of peer influence, assortative matching on preferences and the effect of social interaction on choices. We find that friends and classmates are matched on socio-demographic characteristics but not on risk preferences. In contrast, social interaction strongly increases the similarity of teenagers’ risky choices. A large fraction of peers align their choices perfectly.

Suggested Citation

  • Konstanting Lucks & Melanie Lührmann & Joachim K. Winter, 2017. "Peer effects in risky choices among adolescents," IFS Working Papers W17/16, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:17/16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/wps/WP201716.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Erik Hanushek & Stephen Machin & Ludger Woessmann (ed.), 2011. "Handbook of the Economics of Education," Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 4, number 4, June.
    2. Matthias Sutter & Francesco Feri & Martin G. Kocher & Peter Martinsson & Katarina Nordblom & Daniela Rützler, 2010. "Social preferences in childhood and adolescence - A large-scale experiment," Working Papers 2010-13, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck.
    3. A. Colin Cameron & Jonah B. Gelbach & Douglas L. Miller, 2008. "Bootstrap-Based Improvements for Inference with Clustered Errors," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(3), pages 414-427, August.
    4. David Card & Laura Giuliano, 2013. "Peer Effects and Multiple Equilibria in the Risky Behavior of Friends," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(4), pages 1130-1149, October.
    5. Zumbühl, M.A. & Dohmen, T.J. & Pfann, G.A., 2013. "Parental investment and the intergenerational transmission of economic preferences and attitudes," Research Memorandum 033, Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE).
    6. Hanushek, Eric A. & Woessmann, Ludger, 2011. "The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement," Handbook of the Economics of Education, in: Erik Hanushek & Stephen Machin & Ludger Woessmann (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Education, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 2, pages 89-200, Elsevier.
    7. Gordon B. Dahl & Katrine V. L?ken & Magne Mogstad, 2014. "Peer Effects in Program Participation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(7), pages 2049-2074, July.
    8. Houser, Daniel & Schunk, Daniel & Winter, Joachim, 2010. "Distinguishing trust from risk: An anatomy of the investment game," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 74(1-2), pages 72-81, May.
    9. Mohammed Abdellaoui & Han Bleichrodt & Olivier L’Haridon, 2008. "A tractable method to measure utility and loss aversion under prospect theory," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 36(3), pages 245-266, June.
    10. Kenneth R. Ahern & Ran Duchin & Tyler Shumway, 2014. "Peer Effects in Risk Aversion and Trust," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 27(11), pages 3213-3240.
    11. Tversky, Amos & Kahneman, Daniel, 1992. "Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Uncertainty," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 5(4), pages 297-323, October.
    12. Thomas Dohmen & Armin Falk & David Huffman & Uwe Sunde & Jürgen Schupp & Gert G. Wagner, 2011. "Individual Risk Attitudes: Measurement, Determinants, And Behavioral Consequences," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 522-550, June.
    13. Orazio Attanasio & Abigail Barr & Juan Camilo Cardenas & Garance Genicot & Costas Meghir, 2012. "Risk Pooling, Risk Preferences, and Social Networks," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(2), pages 134-167, April.
    14. Christian Dustmann, 2004. "Parental background, secondary school track choice, and wages," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 56(2), pages 209-230, April.
    15. Hans-Martin von Gaudecker & Arthur van Soest & Erik Wengstrom, 2011. "Heterogeneity in Risky Choice Behavior in a Broad Population," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 664-694, April.
    16. Charles F. Manski, 2000. "Economic Analysis of Social Interactions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 115-136, Summer.
    17. John Beshears & James J. Choi & David Laibson & Brigitte C. Madrian & Katherine L. Milkman, 2015. "The Effect of Providing Peer Information on Retirement Savings Decisions," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(3), pages 1161-1201, June.
    18. Fafchamps, Marcel & Gubert, Flore, 2007. "The formation of risk sharing networks," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(2), pages 326-350, July.
    19. Armin Falk & Andrea Ichino, 2006. "Clean Evidence on Peer Effects," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 24(1), pages 39-58, January.
    20. Scott E. Carrell & Bruce I. Sacerdote & James E. West, 2013. "From Natural Variation to Optimal Policy? The Importance of Endogenous Peer Group Formation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(3), pages 855-882, May.
    21. Leonardo Bursztyn & Florian Ederer & Bruno Ferman & Noam Yuchtman, 2014. "Understanding Mechanisms Underlying Peer Effects: Evidence From a Field Experiment on Financial Decisions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 82(4), pages 1273-1301, July.
    22. Glätzle-Rützler, Daniela & Sutter, Matthias & Zeileis, Achim, 2015. "No myopic loss aversion in adolescents? – An experimental note," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 169-176.
    23. Tomomi Tanaka & Colin F. Camerer & Quang Nguyen, 2010. "Risk and Time Preferences: Linking Experimental and Household Survey Data from Vietnam," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(1), pages 557-571, March.
    24. Lahno, Amrei M. & Serra-Garcia, Marta & D’Exelle, Ben & Verschoor, Arjan, 2015. "Conflicting risk attitudes," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 136-149.
    25. William Harbaugh & Kate Krause & Lise Vesterlund, 2002. "Risk Attitudes of Children and Adults: Choices Over Small and Large Probability Gains and Losses," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 5(1), pages 53-84, June.
    26. Fafchamps, Marcel & Kebede, Bereket & Zizzo, Daniel John, 2015. "Keep up with the winners: Experimental evidence on risk taking, asset integration, and peer effects," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 59-79.
    27. A. Colin Cameron & Douglas L. Miller, 2015. "A Practitioner’s Guide to Cluster-Robust Inference," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 50(2), pages 317-372.
    28. Daniel Zizzo, 2010. "Experimenter demand effects in economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 13(1), pages 75-98, March.
    29. repec:dau:papers:123456789/4392 is not listed on IDEAS
    30. Moulton, Brent R., 1986. "Random group effects and the precision of regression estimates," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 385-397, August.
    31. 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..
    32. Camerer, Colin F & Ho, Teck-Hua, 1994. "Violations of the Betweenness Axiom and Nonlinearity in Probability," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 8(2), pages 167-196, March.
    33. Charles F. Manski, 1993. "Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 60(3), pages 531-542.
    34. Quang Nguyen & Colin Camerer & Tomomi Tanaka, 2010. "Risk and Time Preferences Linking Experimental and Household Data from Vietnam," Post-Print halshs-00547090, HAL.
    35. 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.
    36. 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..
    37. George Wu & Richard Gonzalez, 1996. "Curvature of the Probability Weighting Function," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(12), pages 1676-1690, December.
    38. Bruce Sacerdote, 2001. "Peer Effects with Random Assignment: Results for Dartmouth Roommates," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(2), pages 681-704.
    39. Nathalie Etchart-Vincent & Olivier l’Haridon, 2011. "Monetary incentives in the loss domain and behavior toward risk: An experimental comparison of three reward schemes including real losses," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 42(1), pages 61-83, February.
    40. Hans-Martin von Gaudecker & Arthur van Soest & Erik Wengstrom, 2011. "Heterogeneity in Risky Choice Behavior in a Broad Population," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 664-694, April.
    41. Zumbühl, M.A. & Dohmen, T.J. & Pfann, G.A., 2013. "Parental investment and the intergenerational transmission of economic preferences," ROA Research Memorandum 011, Maastricht University, Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA).
    42. Erik Hanushek & Stephen Machin & Ludger Woessmann (ed.), 2011. "Handbook of the Economics of Education," Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 3, number 3, June.
    43. Alan, Sule & Baydar, Nazli & Boneva, Teodora & Crossley, Thomas F. & Ertac, Seda, 2017. "Transmission of risk preferences from mothers to daughters," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 60-77.
    44. Berg Joyce & Dickhaut John & McCabe Kevin, 1995. "Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 122-142, July.
    45. Matthew O. Jackson & Brian W. Rogers, 2007. "Meeting Strangers and Friends of Friends: How Random Are Social Networks?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 890-915, June.
    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. Meier, Armando N. & Odermatt, Reto & Stutzer, Alois, 2021. "Tobacco sales prohibition and teen smoking," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 188(C), pages 998-1014.

    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. Lucks, Konstantin E. & Lührmann, Melanie & Winter, Joachim, 2020. "Assortative matching and social interaction: A field experiment on adolescents’ risky choices," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 170(C), pages 313-340.
    2. Tamás Csermely & Alexander Rabas, 2016. "How to reveal people’s preferences: Comparing time consistency and predictive power of multiple price list risk elicitation methods," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 53(2), pages 107-136, December.
    3. Ferdinand M. Vieider & Peter Martinsson & Pham Khanh Nam & Nghi Truong, 2019. "Risk preferences and development revisited," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 86(1), pages 1-21, February.
    4. Arnaud Reynaud & Cécile Aubert, 2020. "Does flood experience modify risk preferences? Evidence from an artefactual field experiment in Vietnam," The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association), vol. 45(1), pages 36-74, March.
    5. Dimant, Eugen, 2015. "On Peer Effects: Behavioral Contagion of (Un)Ethical Behavior and the Role of Social Identity," MPRA Paper 68732, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Mark J. Browne & Annette Hofmann & Andreas Richter & Sophie-Madeleine Roth & Petra Steinorth, 2021. "Peer effects in risk preferences: Evidence from Germany," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 1129-1163, April.
    7. Shuoli Zhao & Chengyan Yue, 2020. "Risk preferences of commodity crop producers and specialty crop producers: An application of prospect theory," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 51(3), pages 359-372, May.
    8. David Blake & Edmund Cannon & Douglas Wright, 2021. "Quantifying loss aversion: Evidence from a UK population survey," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 63(1), pages 27-57, August.
    9. Marc Oliver Rieger & Mei Wang & Thorsten Hens, 2015. "Risk Preferences Around the World," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(3), pages 637-648, March.
    10. Jonathan Chapman & Erik Snowberg & Stephanie Wang & Colin Camerer, 2018. "Loss Attitudes in the U.S. Population: Evidence from Dynamically Optimized Sequential Experimentation (DOSE)," NBER Working Papers 25072, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Johannes G. Jaspersen & Marc A. Ragin & Justin R. Sydnor, 2020. "Linking subjective and incentivized risk attitudes: The importance of losses," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 60(2), pages 187-206, April.
    12. Bonan, Jacopo & Battiston, Pietro & Bleck, Jaimie & LeMay-Boucher, Philippe & Pareglio, Stefano & Sarr, Bassirou & Tavoni, Massimo, 2021. "Social interaction and technology adoption: Experimental evidence from improved cookstoves in Mali," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).
    13. Heutel, Garth, 2019. "Prospect theory and energy efficiency," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 236-254.
    14. Bernard, Kévin & Bonein, Aurélie & Bougherara, Douadia, 2020. "Consumer inequality aversion and risk preferences in community supported agriculture," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).
    15. Daichi Shimamoto & Yasuyuki Todo & Yu Ri Kim & Petr Matous, 2022. "Identifying and decomposing peer effects on decision-making using a randomized controlled trial," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(2), pages 1029-1058, August.
    16. Campos-Vazquez, Raymundo M. & Cuilty, Emilio, 2014. "The role of emotions on risk aversion: A Prospect Theory experiment," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 1-9.
    17. Arjan Verschoor & Ben D’Exelle, 2022. "Probability weighting for losses and for gains among smallholder farmers in Uganda," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 92(1), pages 223-258, February.
    18. Kpegli, Yao Thibaut & Corgnet, Brice & Zylbersztejn, Adam, 2023. "All at once! A comprehensive and tractable semi-parametric method to elicit prospect theory components," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C).
    19. Olivier Toubia & Eric Johnson & Theodoros Evgeniou & Philippe Delquié, 2013. "Dynamic Experiments for Estimating Preferences: An Adaptive Method of Eliciting Time and Risk Parameters," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(3), pages 613-640, June.
    20. Tabea Herrmann & Olaf Hübler & Lukas Menkhoff & Ulrich Schmidt, 2017. "Allais for the poor: Relations to ability, information processing, and risk attitudes," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 54(2), pages 129-156, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    peer effects; assortative matching; social interaction; risk and loss aversion;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ifs:ifsewp:17/16. 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: Emma Hyman (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifsssuk.html .

    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.