‘Two-third parents, children willing to take risk for immediate but smaller rewards’

Two-thirds of the parents and children in Bangladesh are willing to take some degree of risk to get immediate but smaller rewards, according to a research paper.

On other hand, more than half of parents and children in the country cannot keep their patience to achieve delayed but larger rewards, it said.

Prof Shyamal Chowdhury of the University of Sydney unveiled the findings while presenting the paper titled, "Economic preferences across generations and family clusters: A large-scale experiment in a developing country" at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS).

"In terms of social preferences, less than 10 per cent of parents and children are selfless, less than 10 per cent of mothers and more than 20 per cent of fathers are egalitarian, and approximately 17 per cent of children are egalitarian," he said.

The survey, conducted on 542 families from Chandpur, Gopalganj, Sunamganj, and Netrokona, has been published by the University of Chicago in the US.

Prof Shyamal and Prof Matthias Sutter of the University of Cologne in Germany and Prof Klaus F. Zimmermann of Maastricht University in the Netherlands authored the paper.

BIDS Research Director Monzur Hossain chaired the programme.