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Preference conformism: An experiment
journal contribution
posted on 2018-06-19, 10:26 authored by Enrique Fatas, Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap, David Rojo ArjonaThis paper reports on an experiment designed to test whether people's preferences change to become more alike. Such preference conformism would be worrying for an economics that takes individual preferences as given (‘de gustibus es non disputandum’). So the test is important. But it is also difficult. People can behave alike for many reasons and the key to the design of our test, therefore, is the control of the other possible reasons for observing apparent peer effects. We find evidence of preference conformism in the aggregate and at the individual level (where there is heterogeneity). It appears also to be more consistent with Festinger's epistemic account of why it might occur than that of Social Identity Theory.
Funding
Fatas and Hargreaves Heap’s work was supported by the Economic and Social Science Research Council through the Network for Integrated Behavioural Science (Grant reference ES/K002201/1). Funding from the Economic Science Institute and the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London is gratefully acknowledged.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Economics
Published in
European Economic ReviewVolume
105Pages
71 - 82Citation
FATAS, E., HARGREAVES HEAP, S.P. and ROJO ARJONA, D., 2018. Preference conformism: An experiment. European Economic Review, 105, pp.71-82.Publisher
Elsevier © The AuthorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-02-26Publication date
2018-03-23Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
0014-2921Publisher version
Language
- en