Aging and decision making: A comparison between neurologically healthy elderly and young individuals
Abstract
We report the results of experiments on economic decisions with two populations, one of healthy elderly individuals (average age 82) and one of younger students (average age 20). We examine confidence, decisions under uncertainty, differences between willingness to pay and willingness to accept and the theory of mind (strategic thinking). Our findings indicate that the older adults' decision behavior is similar to that of young adults, contrary to the notion that economic decision making is impaired with age. Choices over lotteries do not reflect the age differences previously reported in the psychology and biology literature. Moreover, some of the demonstrated decision behaviors suggest that the elderly individuals are less biased than the younger individuals.(1)There is a greater prevalence of overconfident behavior in the younger population. (2) Our results show no significant support for a theory of an endowment effect in either population. (3) Both populations perform similarly on the beauty contest task, although there is a modest indication of a higher incidence of confused behavior by the older.
Additional Information
We thank Dr. Gail Murdock and Dr. Linda Clark, from the ADRC, who coordinated the recruitment of the older population and provided demographic data for these subjects. We also thank Kathy Zeiler for her assistance with the loss aversion methodology, as well as Neda Afsarmanesh for her involvement in the questionnaire design. The financial support of the National Science Foundation, the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, the Arthur R. Adams Fellowship, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation are gratefully acknowledged. For their reading of and helpful responses to early versions of our paper, we thank Dr. John Conlisk and our article's anonymous referee. 14Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 82955
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20171103-153904140
- NSF
- Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
- Arthur R. Adams Fellowship
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- Created
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2017-11-06Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Social Science Working Papers
- Series Name
- Social Science Working Paper
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 1180