Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.This project involved two economics experiments conducted using an existing household panel survey. The experiments aimed at understanding possible sources of heterogeneity in important economic outcomes such as saving and wealth accumulation. The two experiments use the CentERpanel, an online, weekly, stratified survey of a sample of over 2,000 households and 5,000 individual members, conducted in the Netherlands (not currently held at the UK Data Archive). The CentERdata DNB Household Survey, 2008 and 2009 provided a unique opportunity to combine experimental data with sociodemographic and economic variables from the survey. The subjects in the experiment were randomly recruited from the CentERpanel sample. The first experiment, concerned with decision-making under uncertainty, was conducted in May 2009 with 1,182 CentERpanel adult members. The second experiment, concerning intertemporal decision making, was conducted in June and September 2011 with 1,425 panel members. Subjects were presented with a sequence of decision problems: under uncertainty in the first experiment and over time in the second experiment. In the first experiment decision problems could be interpreted as the allocation of an endowment between two risky assets, while they are the allocation of an endowment over two payment dates in the second experiment. These decision problems were presented using and adapting a graphical interface introduced by Choi et al. (2007). Because the design was user-friendly, it was possible to present each subject with many choices, allowing analysis of the data at the level of the individual subject. Rich, individual-level information of experimental choices allows the separate measurement of quality and preferences of decision-making under uncertainty and over time. This analysis was then related to socio-demographic information and economic outcomes, such as saving and wealth accumulation...