We study the following basic intuition: when faced with a decision how to split their investment between a risky lottery and an asset with a fixed return, people increase the proportion invested in the risky option the more they like the lottery. We find counter-examples to this, and in fact we...

The standard procedure in experimental economics maintains anonymity among laboratory participants. Yet, many field interactions are conducted with neither complete anonymity nor complete familiarity. When we are involved in interactive situations in the field, we usually have some clues...

Can incentives be effective when trying to encourage the development of good habits? We investigate the effect of paying people a non-trivial amount of money to attend an exercise facility a number of times during a one-month period. In two separate studies, we find that doing so leads to a...

Are men more willing to take financial risks than women? The answer to this question has immediate relevance for many economic issues. We propose a novel approach in which we assemble the data from 10 sets of experiments with one simple underlying investment game. Most of these experiments were...

We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases physical activity. The main result is that it generates a strong and significant improvement in...

Risk Management Research Report (RMRR) surveys and screens the flow of academic articles on risk management and presents extended scholarly summaries of today's most important scholarly work in a convenient format on a timely basis. Each issue features approximately 15 of the most important...

The Holt and Laury (2002) mechanism (HL) is the most widely-used method for eliciting risk preferences in economics. Participants typically make ten decisions with different variance options, with one of these choices randomly-chosen for actual payoff. For this mechanism to provide an accurate...

We study the following basic intuition: when faced with a decision how to split their investment between a risky lottery and an asset with a fixed return, people increase the proportion invested in the risky option the more they like the lottery. We find counter-examples to this, and in fact we...

Are men more willing to take financial risks than women? The answer to this important question is not clear from the existing literature. We propose a novel approach to this issue, in which we both assemble the data from many experiments with thousands of participants in a simple investment...