Detecting Heterogeneous Risk Attitudes with Mixed Gambles

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_DEEC1A05C0BB
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Detecting Heterogeneous Risk Attitudes with Mixed Gambles
Journal
Theory and Decision
Author(s)
Santos-Pinto L., Bruhin A., Mata J., Astebro T.
ISSN
0040-5833
Publication state
Published
Issued date
02/2015
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
79
Number
4
Pages
573-600
Language
english
Abstract
We propose a task for eliciting attitudes toward risk that is close to real-world risky decisions which typically involve gains and losses. The task consists of accepting or rejecting gambles that provide a gain with probability p and a loss with probability 1−p . We employ finite mixture models to uncover heterogeneity in risk preferences and find that (i) behavior is heterogeneous, with one half of the subjects behaving as expected utility maximizers, (ii) for the others, reference-dependent models perform better than those where subjects derive utility from final outcomes, (iii) models with sign-dependent decision weights perform better than those without, and (iv) there is no evidence for loss aversion. The procedure is sufficiently simple so that it can be easily used in field or lab experiments where risk elicitation is not the main experiment.
Keywords
Individual risk-taking behavior, Latent heterogeneity, Finite mixture models, Reference-dependence, Loss aversion
Web of science
Create date
15/12/2015 18:09
Last modification date
20/08/2019 17:03
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