Does luck make people more optimistic and patient? : lessons from an experiment with students and rural subjects in Malawi

We investigate how random luck in repeated variants of the risky investment game of Gneezy, Leonard, and List (2009); Gneezy and Potters (1997) influences risk-taking and discounting behavior in future risky prospects with probabilistic payouts one week, six, 12, and 24 months into the future. We test non-parametrically whether luck enhances risk-taking and patience (reduces the discount rate) in risky prospects with delayed payouts. To investigate whether luck influences probability weighting (w(p) function), we estimate structural models with two-parameter Prelec probability weighting functions to decompose risk-taking in prospects with potential payouts six and 12 months into the future. We find that luck results in more optimistic (reduces the Prelec β parameter) and less non-linear (inverse-S-shaped) (increases the Prelec α parameter) w(p) function. We assess this for two samples from Malawi: one is a random sample of university students (n=721), and the other is a random sample (n=835) of rural subjects with limited education. The students were found to be more patient but had similar probability weighting functions.