Field evidence suggests that agents belonging to the same group tend to behave similarly, i.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. Testing for such effects raises severe identification problems. We conduct an experiment that avoids these problems. The main design feature is that each...

The results of a new experimental study reveal highly systematic violations of expected utility theory. The pattern of these violations is exactly the opposite of the classical common ratio effect discovered by Allais (1953). Two recent decision theories— stochastic expected utility theory...

It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellectual tasks. We report that in a company takeover experiment, groups placed better bids than individuals and substantially reduced the winner’s curse. This improvement was mostly due to peer pressure over the...

How does risk tolerance vary with stake size? This important question cannot be adequately answered if framing effects, nonlinear probability weighting, and heterogeneity of preference types are neglected. We show that, contrary to gains, no coherent change in relative risk aversion is observed...

When valuing risky prospects, people tend to overweight small probabilities and to underweight large probabilities. Nonlinear probability weighting has proven to be a robust empirical phenomenon and has been integrated in decision models, such as cumulative prospect theory. Based on a laboratory...

This paper analyzes individual decision making under risk. It is assumed that an individual does not have a preference relation on the set of risky lotteries. Instead, an individual possesses a probability measure that captures the likelihood of one lottery being chosen over the other. Choice...

This paper presents a new incentive compatible method for measuring confidence in own knowledge. This method consists of two parts. First, an individual answers several general knowledge questions. Second, the individual chooses among three alternatives: 1) one question is selected at random and...

In binary choice between discrete outcome lotteries, an individual may prefer lottery L1 to lottery L2 when the probability that L1 delivers a better outcome than L2 is higher than the probability that L2 delivers a better outcome than L1. Such a preference can be rationalized by three standard...

This paper investigates how subjects determine minimum selling prices for lotteries. We design an experiment where subjects have at every moment an incentive to state their minimum selling price and to adjust the price if they believe that the price that they stated initially was not optimal. We...

Elicitation methods in decision making under risk allow a researcher to infer the subjective utilities of outcomes as well as the subjective weights of probabilities from the observed preferences of an individual. An optimally efficient elicitation method is proposed, which takes into account...