Economic Behavior under Alcohol Influence: An Experiment on Time, Risk, and Social Preferences

Quaderni - Working Paper DSE N° 944

34 Pages Posted: 9 May 2014

See all articles by Luca Corazzini

Luca Corazzini

University of Padua - Department of Economics; Bocconi University - Department of Economics

Antonio Filippin

Università degli Studi di Milano; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Paolo Vanin

University of Bologna - Department of Economics

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: May 7, 2014

Abstract

We report results from an incentivized laboratory experiment to provide controlled evidence on the causal effects of alcohol consumption on risk preferences, time perception and altruism. Our design allows disentangling the pharmacological effects of alcohol intoxication from those mediated by expectations, as we compare behaviors of three groups of subjects: those participating to an experiment with no reference to alcohol, those exposed to the possibility of consuming alcohol but assigned to a placebo and those having effectively consumed alcohol. Once randomly assigned to one treatment, subjects were administered a series of consecutive economic tasks, being the sequence kept constant across treatments. After controlling for both the willingness to pay and the potential misperception of probabilities as elicited in the experiment, we do not detect any effect of alcohol in depleting subjects’ risk tolerance. On the contrary, we find that alcohol intoxication increases impatience. Moreover, we find that alcohol makes subjects less generous as we detect a negative relationship between the blood alcohol concentration and the amount of money donated to NGOs.

Keywords: Alcohol, Risk Preferences, Impatience, Laboratory Experiment

JEL Classification: D03, I10, C91

Suggested Citation

Corazzini, Luca and Filippin, Antonio and Vanin, Paolo, Economic Behavior under Alcohol Influence: An Experiment on Time, Risk, and Social Preferences (May 7, 2014). Quaderni - Working Paper DSE N° 944, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2434511 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2434511

Luca Corazzini (Contact Author)

University of Padua - Department of Economics ( email )

via Del Santo 33
Padova, 35123
Italy

Bocconi University - Department of Economics ( email )

Via Gobbi 5
Milan, 20136
Italy

Antonio Filippin

Università degli Studi di Milano ( email )

Milan, 20122
Italy

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Paolo Vanin

University of Bologna - Department of Economics ( email )

Piazza Scaravilli 2
Bologna, BO 40126
Italy
+39-0512098120 (Phone)
+39-0512098040 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/site/paolovanin/

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