SAP Seminar, Dr Richard Ahl

Worth the cost: Children’s intuitive theories of resource acquisition and distribution

Abstract
How do children decide how much something is worth to someone else? Economists understand that one powerful cue to resource value is resource quantity. As the law of diminishing marginal utility states, when resource abundance increases, the value placed on each resource unit decreases. I propose that even young children have an intuitive theory that aligns with this economic law. With three sets of studies, I will show that this “proto-diminishing marginal utility” concept supports predictions about how others are likely to behave and may be implicated in children’s preferences for wealthy people.

About the speaker
Richard E. Ahl received his PhD from Yale University in 2018, where he worked with Frank Keil and Yarrow Dunham. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston College’s Cooperation Lab, where he is supported by a John Templeton Foundation grant to work with Dr Katherine McAuliffe on cross-cultural and developmental variation in children’s virtuous behaviours. His research uses a social cognitive development approach to explore children’s intuitive economic theories and their implications for children’s social preferences and prosocial behaviours.

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