Preference for control affects investment behavior. Participants of laboratory experiments invest different amount of money in a risky asset when face with two different methods of control which have identical payoff structure and probability distribution, but provide different sense of control....

Data on contestants’ choices in Italian Game Show Affari Tuoi are analysed in a way that separatesthe effect of risk attitude (preferences) from that of beliefs concerning the amount ofmoney that will be offered to contestants in future rounds. The most important issue addressedin the paper is...

Economics and management science share the tradition of ordering risk aversionby fitting the best expected utility (EU) model with a certain utility function to in-dividual data, and then using the utility curvature for each individual as the soleindex of risk attitude. (Cumulative) Prospect...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returnsfrom the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presentsexperimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty dependon the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departuresfrom pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others’well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type ofbehavior persists when risk comes into...

In the framework of expected utility theory, risk attitudes are entirely capturedby the curvature of the utility function. In cumulative prospect theory (CPT) riskattitudes have an additional dimension: the weighting of probabilities. With thismodication, one question arises naturally: since...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisonsone defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a frameworkfor one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distributionindividual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...

In this paper we experimentally test skewness seeking at the individuallevel. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degreestochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of theexperiment. We find that the skewness of a distribution has a...

Contrary to the models of deterministic life cycle saving, we take itfor granted that uncertainty of one's future is the essential problem ofsaving decisions. However, unlike the stochastic life cycle models, we capturethis crucial uncertainty by a non-Bayesian scenario-based...

Can one define and test the hypothesis of (un)bounded rationality instochastic choice tasks without endorsing Bayesianism? Similar to the state specificity of assets, we rely on state-specific goal formation. In a given choice task, the list of state-specific goal levels is optimal if one cannot...