Professor: Benjamin Ho
Student: Charlotte Yang

Conscientious Consumerism

This project is a follow-up of the Conscientiousness research begun with a previous Ford Scholar project. That project successfully led to the development of a mathematical theory of the psychological concept of conscientiousness using game theory and behavioral economics. Conscientiousness is part of the Big 5 personality traits (along with Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) psychologists use to measure personality. Various large scale census studies have found that personality factors such as conscientiousness and grit may be a more important predictor of success in life than factors such as parental education or innate intelligence (Segal; Duckworth; Heckman). However, the traditional measures of conscientiousness have relied on self-reported survey instruments, whereas economics prefer measures based on actual incentivized choices.

Thus, just as the Berg-Dickhaut-McCabe experimental trust game revolutionized how economists study trust, we hope to change how economists think about Conscientiousness. Building on the work of last year’s Ford Scholar who came up with a mathematical theory of conscientiousness, we intend to test this model using online experiments. In the experiment, we ask every participant to do two rounds of the same task – each consisting of 10 steps – based on different payments: either a single payment of 2 dollars regardless of performance and a piece-rate payment of 20 cents for each one of the ten successfully completed steps of the task (commission based). We will then compare their performance and see if it relates to the payment structure, and in turn, conscientiousness. We also ask our participants to answer surveys regarding their risk and time preferences, personality, intelligence, and social behavior in order to correlate to the subject of our study.

We are using several online tools to conduct our experiment: Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service where we are able to recruit workers to participate in our study and issue payments; SoPHIE, a recently developed online survey tool; several other online experimenting/survey tools are also being tested out and summarized. So far we have developed an online experiment and just recently launched our pilot study consisting of 100 subjects. For the rest of the summer, we are planning to revise our study design, run the full-scale study, collect data, and hopefully analyze data as well.