This paper demonstrates gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. It also contributes to a growing literature relating economic preference parameters to psychological measures by asking whether variations in preference parameters among persons, and in particular across genders,...

The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm in applied microeconomics. However, as is well known, it...

health disparities, health behaviors, dynamic demand, side effects, structural models, HIV/AIDSaThis paper analyzes the stability and distribution of ambiguity attitudes using a broad population sample. Using high-powered incentives, we collected six waves of data on ambiguity attitudes about...

The focus of this paper is the analysis of the persistent lawlessness attitude observed in some transition and developing countries where an overall increase in the quality of institutions is recorded. The mechanism of information diffusion on institutional quality is explored using a model...

According to social-psychological research, feelings of uncertainty in decision-making evoke two opposite responses: (i) reduction of uncertainty by information search, leading to less stereotyping of people, and hence less discrimination; (ii) social identification with an ingroup, inducing...

The Global Crisis demonstrated to the world that Ratings Agencies had misled the public about the stability of financial institutions. The Finance literature had decided that it was impossible to have bubbles in financial markets and any surge in the stock market would be self-correcting. Recent...

Forecasting errors pose a serious problem of identification, often neglected in empirical applications. Any attempt of estimating choice models under uncertainty may lead to severely biased results in the presence of forecasting errors even when individual expectations on future events are...

Optimal layoff rules in closed form are derived for all workers in a firm that downsizes under uncertainty and faces heterogeneous firing costs. The theoretical model predicts that the firm displaces workers with low firing costs, low expected future productivity growth, and low layoff option...