The development of consistent decision-making across economic domains

How does value-based reasoning develop and how different this development is from one domain to another? We propose a novel experimental design where children 5 to 11 years old make pairwise choices in the Goods (toys), Social (sharing between self and other), and Risk (lotteries) domains, and we evaluate the consistency of their choices. The development of consistency across domains cannot be fully accounted for by existing developmental paradigms such as transitive reasoning, attentional control and centration. We show that choice consistency is related to self-knowledge of preferences which develops gradually and differentially across domains. The Goods domain offers a developmental template: children become more consistent over time because they learn what they like most and least. In the Social domain, children gradually learn what they like most, while in the Risk domain they gradually learn what they like least. These asymmetric developments give rise to asymmetric patterns of consistency.