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Understanding Economic Behavior Using Open-Ended Survey Data

Ingar Haaland¹; Christopher G. Roth²; Stefanie Stantcheva³; Johannes Wohlfart⁴

¹ NHH Norwegian School of Economics, FAIR, and CEPR. · ² University of Cologne and ECONtribute, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, CEPR, and NHH Norwegian School of Economics. · ³ Harvard University, NBER, and CEPR · ⁴ University of Cologne and ECONtribute, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, CEBI, and CESifo.

We survey the recent literature in economics using open-ended survey data to uncover mechanisms behind economic beliefs and behaviors. We first provide an overview of different applications, including the measurement of motives, mental models, narratives, attention, information transmission, and recall. We next describe different ways of eliciting open-ended responses, including single-item open-ended questions, speech recordings, and artificial intelligence–powered qualitative interviews. Subsequently, we discuss methods to annotate and analyze such data with a focus on recent advances in large language models. Our review concludes with a discussion of promising avenues for future research. (JEL C83, C90, D83, D91)

DOI

10.1257/jel.20251780

Volume

63 (4)

Pages

1244-1280

Language

en

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