IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tcr/wpaper/e85.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An Experimental Study of Money Illusion in Intertemporal Decision Making

Author

Listed:
  • Tetsuo Yamamori
  • Kazuyuki Iwata
  • Akira Ogawa

Abstract

To examine the degree to which price fluctuations affect how individuals approach an intertemporal decision-making problem, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which subjects spend their savings on consumption over 20 periods. In the control treatment, the commodity price is constant across all periods. In the small (large) price-fluctuation treatment, the price rate of change is always 1% (20%), and the rate of change of savings is always the same as the commodity price. Therefore, the optimal amount of consumption is the same in all three treatments. Our main findings are threefold. First, the magnitude of misconsumption (i.e., the deviation from optimal consumption) is significantly high in order of the control, small price-fluctuation, and large price-fluctuation treatments. Second, in the control treatment, the magnitude of misconsumption shrinks over time, whereas it gradually increases in the small and large price-fluctuation treatments. Finally, regardless of the presence of price fluctuations, subjects exhibit under-consumption (over-saving) behavior, and the presence of price fluctuations strengthens such a tendency.

Suggested Citation

  • Tetsuo Yamamori & Kazuyuki Iwata & Akira Ogawa, 2014. "An Experimental Study of Money Illusion in Intertemporal Decision Making," Working Papers e85, Tokyo Center for Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:tcr:wpaper:e85
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://tcer.or.jp/wp/pdf/e85.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Houser, Daniel & Winter, Joachim, 2004. "How Do Behavioral Assumptions Affect Structural Inference? Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 22(1), pages 64-79, January.
    2. Allen, Todd W. & Carroll, Christopher D., 2001. "Individual Learning About Consumption," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(02), pages 255-271, April.
    3. Stephen Johnson & Laurence J. Kotlikoff & William Samuelson, 1987. "Can People Compute? An Experimental Test of the Life Cycle Consumption Model," NBER Working Papers 2183, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Charles N. Noussair & Gregers Richter & Jean-Robert Tyran, 2008. "Money Illusion and Nominal Inertia in Experimental Asset Markets," Discussion Papers 08-29, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    5. Kahneman, Daniel & Knetsch, Jack L & Thaler, Richard, 1986. "Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking: Entitlements in the Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(4), pages 728-741, September.
    6. Binswanger, Johannes, 2011. "Dynamic decision making with feasibility goals: A procedural-rationality approach," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 78(3), pages 219-228, May.
    7. Matthew E. Kahn, 2005. "The Death Toll from Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography, and Institutions," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(2), pages 271-284, May.
    8. Binswanger, Johannes, 2012. "Life cycle saving: Insights from the perspective of bounded rationality," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(3), pages 605-623.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Negative Nominal Interest Rates (again)
      by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets on 2016-08-22 19:13:27

    More about this item

    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:tcr:wpaper:e85. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Satoshi Koibuchi). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/tctokjp.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.