THE BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS GUIDE 2016

and Alexandre Mas (2015), examined the productivity spillover effect—the extent to which a
worker’s productivity affects the productivity of co-workers. Results indicate that laboratory
studies in this particular domain of research generalize quantitatively very well to field (‘realworld’)
studies. Gary Charness and Ernst Fehr (2015) consider the results encouraging, especially
in view of the issues that are usually raised in the lab-to-field generalizability debate. One study
(Mitchell, 2012) that had previously added to this debate found the correlation of lab-field
effects to be quite low in social psychology, one of BE’s allied disciplines.
Scholars are taking a greater interest in the generalizability across cultures of insights generated
by behavioral economics. Savani et al. (2016) review the cultural context of judgment and
decision-making (JDM), particularly the domains of risky decisions, preference-choice
consistency, causal attributions, and optimism. The authors call for more research that identifies
specific cultural factors (values, norms, self-construals, schemas, etc.) that may explain findings
in the JDM arena.
Armin Falk and collaborators (2015) have presented fascinating evidence on the cross-cultural
variability of the types of preferences that behavioral economists frequently study: Preferences
about risk, the timing of rewards (future vs. present), altruism, reciprocity (positive and
negative), and trust. Their dataset includes a sample of 80,000 people from 76 countries who
responded to a behaviorally validated Global Preference Survey (GPS; see derived European
examples for which data were available in Figure 1). This provides for a new reading of national
and regional propensities and shows, for example, that that Northern European and Anglo-Saxon
countries appear to be the most patient in terms of preferences about the timing of rewards.
These countries are also the most negatively reciprocal. Preferences often vary more within
countries than between countries. At the individual level, relationships between preferences and
gender, age, and cognitive ability were also analyzed. Results reveal that throughout the world
there are significant associations between cognitive skills, risk preferences, and patience, while
other relationships vary substantially between regional cultures.
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