The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Cognitive skills affect economic preferences, strategic behavior, and job attachment
Open accessAbstract
Economic analysis has so far said little about how an individual's cognitive skills (CS) are related to the individual's economic preferences in different choice domains, such as risk taking or saving, and how preferences in different domains are related to each other. Using a sample of 1,000 trainee truckers we report three findings. First, there is a strong and significant relationship between an individual's CS and preferences. Individuals with better CS are more patient, in both short- and long-run. Better CS are also associated with a greater willingness to take calculated risks. Second, CS predict social awareness and choices in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma game. Subjects with better CS more accurately forecast others' behavior and differentiate their behavior as a second mover more strongly depending on the first-mover's choice. Third, CS, and in particular, the ability to plan, strongly predict perseverance on the job in a setting with a substantial financial penalty for early exit. Consistent with CS being a common factor in all of these preferences and behaviors, we find a strong pattern of correlation among them. These results, taken together with the theoretical explanation we offer for the relationships we find, suggest that higher CS systematically affect preferences and choices in ways that favor economic success.
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“Numerical skills are already known to affect such decisions significantly (1, 7), and our results generalize this finding.”
Result
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Cited by
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Laibson, D. (1997) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355397555253 · Cited by 6,122
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Metadata
- Authors
- Burks, S. V., Carpenter, J. P., Goette, L., & Rustichini, A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2009-05-12
- Volume
- 106
- Issue
- 19
- Pages
- 7745-7750
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W1973459881
- Cited by
- 661
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 22.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
