This paper complements evidence on the Allais paradox from advanced countries and educated people by a novel investigation in a poor rural area. The share of Allais-type behavior is indeed high and related to characteristics of "lacking ability", such as poor education, unemployment, and little...

Standard economic theory assumes that individual risk taking decisions are independent from the social context. Recent experimental evidence however shows that the income of peers has a systematic impact on observed degrees of risk aversion. In particular, subjects strive for balance in the...

According to rational choice theory, preference orderings should be invariant with respect to the elicitation procedure. The contingent trade-off model (Tversky et al., 1988), however, argues that if an attribute of decision alterna-tives is also used as response mode (scale compatibility), then...

The present paper contributes to the controversy regarding gender differences in risk taking by investigating the impact of social comparison. Social comparison is formalized by integrating a social reference point into the model of Köszegi and Rabin. Drawing on previous results from...

One possible conclusion from recent experimental research on decision making under risk is that observed behaviour can be reasonable accommodated by expected utility plus an error term. This conclusion implies that the violation rate of expected utility should decrease if errors are excluded....

Empirical research has shown that inexperienced fund managers yield significantly higher returns than their more experienced colleagues. If the portfolios of inexperienced are not more risky, this result would contradict the hypothesis of market efficiency. Therefore, it is an important question...

This study provides evidence from a questionnaire survey of fund managers. We find that the majority of respondents rely on momentum, contrarian and buy-&-hold strategies to some degree. Although there were few applicants who exclusively rely on a single trading strategy, clear preferences...

Our questionnaire survey finds that most fund managers rely on the strategies of buy-&-hold, momentum and contrarian trading. These strategies are typically applied mutually. Their use is rooted in the attributes and beliefs of the respective fund managers: buy-&-hold traders behave...

Many public goods like dams, fire departments, and lighthouses do not provide direct utility but act more as insurance devices against floods, fire, and shipwreck. They either diminish the probability or the size of the loss. We extend the public good model with this insurance aspect and...

In the context of eliciting preferences for decision making under risk, we ask the question: “which might be the ‘best’ method for eliciting such preferences?”. It is well known that different methods differ in terms of the bias in the elicitation; it is rather less well-known that...