We consider the external validity of laboratory measures of risk attitude. Based on a large-scale experiment using a representative panel of the Dutch population, we test if these measures can explain two different types of behavior: (i) behavior in laboratory risky financial decisions, and (ii)...

Probabilistic risk beliefs are key drivers of economic and health decisions, but people are not always certain about their beliefs. We study these "imprecise probabilities", also known as ambiguous beliefs. We show that imprecision is measurable separately from the levels of risk beliefs. People...

A core prediction of recent "dual-self" models is that a person's risk attitudes depend on her current level of self-control. While these models have received a lot of attention, empirical studies tailored to testing their core prediction are lacking. Using two prominent models, we derive...

The psychological basis for rank-dependent probability weighting, and for an inverse-S probability weighting function (PWF) in particular, has often been questioned. I examine the existence and shape of the PWF in a model allowing for optimism/pessimism over probability distributions and for...

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks on an 11-point scale, we find...

Many economic decisions involve a substantial amount of uncertainty, and therefore crucially depend on how individuals process probabilistic information. In this paper, we investigate the capability for probability judgment in a representative sample of the German population. Our results show...

People differ in their willingness to take risks. Recent work found that revealed preference tasks (e.g., laboratory lotteries)-a dominant class of measures-are outperformed by survey-based stated preferences, which are more stable and predict real-world risk taking across different domains. How...