Subjective beliefs and economic preferences during the COVID-19 pandemic
通过在线激励实验，研究了美国人在疫情期间的跨期风险偏好和主观信念变化，发现背景风险增加会改变风险溢价，且对死亡人数的信念在2020年5月至11月间剧烈波动。
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a remarkable opportunity to put to work all of the research that has been undertaken in past decades on the elicitation and structural estimation of subjective belief distributions as well as preferences over atemporal risk, patience, and intertemporal risk. As contributors to elements of that research in laboratories and the field, we drew together those methods and applied them to an online, incentivized experiment in the United States. We have two major findings. First, the atemporal risk premium during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to change significantly compared to before the pandemic, consistent with theoretical results of the effect of increased background risk on foreground risk attitudes. Second, subjective beliefs about the cumulative level of deaths evolved dramatically over the period between May and November 2020, a volatile one in terms of the background evolution of the pandemic. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10683-021-09738-3.