Who Is Consistent?
Young rich well-educated men make more consistent choices. Family structure, risk tolerance and personality type don’t matter:
We conduct a large-scale field experiment … to test subjects choices for consistency with utility maximization. … High-income and high-education subjects display greater levels of consistency …, men are more consistent than women, and young subjects are more consistent than older subjects. We also find that consistency with utility maximization is strongly related to wealth: a standard deviation increase in the consistency score is associated with 15-19 percent more wealth. This result conditions on socioeconomic variables including current income, education, and family structure, and is little changed when we add controls for past income, risk tolerance and the results of a standard personality test used by psychologists. (more)
I'm gonna go a head and trot out the standard questions that should be asked to make sense of any of these sorts of 'X are more A than Y' studies:
1. How big are the differences in consistency between groups (e.g. males and females, rich and poor)?2. How much unexplained variation is there within the groups?
The gender difference literature is generally renowned for making 'X are more A than Y' statements when the within group variation swamps the between group variation.
Guess I should go read the paper.
"than people whose choices are restricted by poverty, gender, and/or incompetence."
I thought I would lend a hand.