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The Impact of an Epidemic: Experimental Evidence on Preference Stability from Wuhan

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Matt WalkerORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a conference proceedings (inc. abstract) that has been published in its final definitive form by American Economic Association, 2021.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.

Abstract

We examine how the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in the Hubei province of China impacted pro-social behavior and attitudes toward risk and uncertainty. The study repeatedly applies a panel of financially incentivized individual and strategic decision tasks via the WeChat social media platform to a population of preregistered Wuhan University students. We find that the initial outbreak coupled with the lock-down of Wuhan City led to an uptick in altruism, trust, and ambiguity aversion and a downtick in risk aversion. Over the remaining samples, we observed that all measurements return to baseline levels except for risk aversion.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Shachat J, Walker MJ, Wei L

Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)

Publication status: Published

Conference Name: AEA Papers and Proceedings

Year of Conference: 2021

Pages: 302-306

Online publication date: 31/05/2021

Acceptance date: 11/02/2021

Date deposited: 06/09/2021

Publisher: American Economic Association

URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20211002

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