Subjects who overestimate their performance in experimental tasks unrelated to travel are less willing to insure against failing in the task and also less inclined to buy travel insurance. This suggests intrinsic optimism influences insurance demand and diminishes adverse selection.

This note introduces a scoring rule for ordinal likelihood judgments based on the linear scoring rule. If the ordinal judgments are strict, the scoring rule is incentive compatible for expected utility maximizers as long utility is increasing in wealth. When allowing for non-strict judgments,...

When risk averse forecasters are presented with risk neutral proper scoring rules, they report probabilities whose ratios are shaded towards 1. If elicited probabilities are used as inputs to decision-making, naive elicitors may violate first-order stochastic dominance.

We observe that identification of the discount rate from experimental data requires an assumption about the consumption period, the length of time over which a payment will be turned into utility-providing consumption. We show that the optimal consumption period is substantially longer than...

In three binary choice problems, people reveal a choice pattern which falsifies expected utility theory and many generalized non-expected utility theories. This new paradox challenges popular non-expected utility models analogously to how the Allais paradox challenged neoclassical expected...

We describe an ambiguity hedging problem in Ellsberg experiments, where combinations of individually ambiguous bets eliminate aggregate ambiguity, and which may yield incorrect classifications of ambiguity averse subjects. We propose a new classification consistent with this hedging possibility.

We report an experiment in which subjects are not indifferent between real-money lotteries implemented with randomization devices that are equivalent under the Reduction Axiom. Instead, choice behavior is consistent with subjective distortion of conditional probability, and this persists in...

A stag-hunt game (with the risky and safe actions) has two pure Nash equilibria that are Pareto-rankable. The risky action leads either to the Pareto-superior equilibrium (high payoff) or to out of equilibrium (low payoff) depending on the opponent’s action. Both players may want to obtain...

We study the role of accountability in situations where an agent makes risky decisions for a principal. We observe that in the absence of accountability, agents choose less risk averse investments for the principal than investors who invest for their own account. Accountability mitigates the...

This paper examines the effect of default options on choice behavior in experience-based decisions. To this end, we designed the “radio-button” experimental paradigm, in which participants are asked to set default options that remain effective until they decide to change them, and the...