title: Economic behavior under the influence of alcohol: an experiment on time preferences, risk-taking, and altruism.
abstract: We report results from an incentivized laboratory experiment undertaken with the purpose of providing controlled evidence on the causal effects of alcohol consumption on risk-taking, time preferences and altruism. Our design disentangles the pharmacological effects of alcohol intoxication from those mediated by expectations, as we compare the behavior of three groups of subjects: those who participated in an experiment with no reference to alcohol, those who were exposed to the possibility of consuming alcohol but were given a placebo and those who effectively consumed alcohol. All subjects participated in a series of economic tasks administered in the same sequence across treatments. After controlling for both the willingness to pay for an object and the potential misperception of probabilities as elicited in the experiment, we detect no effect of alcohol in depleting subjects' risk tolerance. However, we find that alcohol intoxication increases impatience and makes subjects less altruistic.
authors: Department of Law Science and History of Institutions, University of Messina, Messina, Italy, and ISLA, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy.
authors: Luca
authors: L
authors: Corazzini
authors: Department of Economics, University of Milan, Milano, Italy, and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany.
authors: Antonio
authors: A
authors: Filippin
authors: Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
authors: Paolo
authors: P
authors: Vanin
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000428:Alcohol Drinking; D000533:Altruism; D000067401:Blood Alcohol Content; D004467:Economics; D006801:Humans; D009042:Motivation; D000067656:Optimism; D010465:Perception; D012309:Risk-Taking; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D000067401:Blood Alcohol Content