On The Correlated Impact Of The Factors Of Risk Aversion On Decision-Making

Risk aversion is among the most advertised and complex factors influencing a decision, but it is itself subject to an intricate complex of both objective and subjective factors. The present paper set out to investigate some of the factors that would have appeared obvious in influencing attitudes towards risk, such as value of options, probability of options, level of information (specifically on probability) and position of the respondent relative to the outcome of the risk (loss or gain). For this purpose we devised a survey testing each of these elements and allowing for interpretation of their interdependence. After analyzing hypothetical situations, we also investigated how these were reflected in self-assessment and real-life behavior. What we found is that, although these factors do play their intuitive role in fundamenting decisions in contexts of risk, they are ill correlated to one another and may themselves not be coherent across different contexts.