On the psychological foundations of ambiguity and compound risk aversion

Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which suggests that compound risk aversion may provide a psychological foundation for ambiguity aversion. However, compound risk aversion and ambiguity aversion may also be independent psychological phenomena, but what would then explain their strong correlation? We tackle these questions by training a treatment group’s ability to reduce compound to simple risks, and analyzing how this affects their compound risk and ambiguity attitudes in comparison to a control group who is taught something unrelated to reducing compound risk. We find that aversion to compound risk disappears almost entirely in the treatment group, while the aversion towards both artificial and natural sources of ambiguity remain high and are basically unaffected by the teaching of how to reduce compound lotteries. Moreover, similar to previous studies, we observe a strong correlation between compound risk aversion and ambiguity aversion, but this correlation only exists in the control group while in the treatment group it is rather low and insignificant. These findings suggest that ambiguity attitudes are not a psychological relative, and derived from, attitudes towards compound risk, i.e., compound risk aversion and ambiguity aversion do not share the same psychological foundations. While compound risk aversion is primarily driven by a form of bounded rationality – the inability to reduce compound lotteries – ambiguity aversion is unrelated to this inability, suggesting that ambiguity aversion may be a genuine preference in its own right.