We investigate the link between poverty and decision-making in a sample of farmers in Zambia, who were given the opportunity to exchange randomly assigned household items for alternative items of similar value. Analyzing a total of 5,842 trading decisions and leveraging multiple sources of variation in financial constraints, we show that exchange asymmetries decrease in magnitude when participants are more constrained. This result is robust to experimental procedures and is not mediated by changes in cognitive performance. Consistent with the interpretation that scarcity leads to more rational decisions by increasing the utility loss from forgone trading, we show that trading probabilities go up when the market value of the items is exogenously increased.

中文翻译：

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穷且理性：稀缺下的决策

我们调查了赞比亚农民样本中贫困与决策之间的联系，他们有机会用随机分配的家庭物品交换价值相似的替代物品。通过分析总共 5,842 个交易决策并利用金融约束的多种变化来源，我们表明，当参与者受到更多约束时，交易不对称的幅度会减小。该结果对实验程序是稳健的，并且不受认知表现变化的影响。与稀缺性通过增加放弃交易的效用损失导致更理性决策的解释一致，我们表明，当项目的市场价值外生增加时，交易概率会上升。