Developments in the theory of risk require yet another evaluation of the behavioral validity of the independence axiom. This axiom plays a central role in most formal statements of expected utility theory, as well as popular alternative models of decision-making under risk, such as...

We evaluate the binary lottery procedure for inducing risk neutral behavior. We strip the experimental implementation down to bare bones, taking care to avoid any potentially confounding assumption about behavior having to be made. In particular, our evaluation does not rely on the assumed...

We characterize the literacy of an individual in a domain by their elicited subjective belief distribution over the possible responses to a question posed in that domain. We consider literacy across several financial, economic and statistical domains. We find considerable demographic...

Experiments are conducted with various purposes in mind including theory testing, mechanism design and measurement of individual characteristics. In each case a careful researcher is constrained in the experimental design by prior considerations imposed either by theory, common sense or past...

Subjective probabilities play a role in many economic decisions. There is a large theoretical literature on the elicitation of subjective probabilities, and an equally large empirical literature. However, there is a gulf between the two. The theoretical literature proposes a range of procedures...

We study the risk attitudes of an important segment of the economy: managers. We conduct artefactual field experiments with 130 managers from 12 industrial companies. Our analysis is particularly careful to evaluate alternative models of decision-making under risk. In general, we find that the...

We show that observed choices in discounting experiments are consistent with roughly one-half of the subjects using exponential discounting and one-half using quasi-hyperbolic discounting. We characterize the latent data generating process using a mixture model which allows different subjects to...

The most popular experimental method for eliciting time preferences involves subjects making choices over smaller, sooner amounts of money and larger, later amounts of money. Under some theoretically possible configurations of preferences and procedures, the discount rates inferred from these...

Policies impose lotteries of outcomes on individuals, since we never know exactly what the effects of the policy will be. In order to evaluate alternative policies, we therefore need to make some assumptions about individual preferences, even before social welfare functions are applied. Instead...

The reduction of compound lotteries (ROCL) has assumed a central role in the evaluation of behavior towards risk and uncertainty. We present experimental evidence on its validity in the domain of objective probabilities. Our experiment explicitly recognizes the impact that the random lottery...