This paper explores the relationship between the self-declared risk aversion of private investors and their propensity to hold incomplete portfolios of financial assets. The analysis is based on household survey data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) that provides a reliable measure of...

This paper characterizes the optimal first-price auction (FPA) and second-price auction (SPA) for selling rights, contracts, or licenses that involve ensuing payoff uncertainty for the winning bidder. The distribution of the random payoff is common knowledge, except that bidders have private...

We report a portfolio-choice experiment that enables us to estimate parametric models of ambiguity aversion at the level of the individual subject. The assets are Arrow securities that correspond to three states of nature, where one state is risky with known probability and two states are...

This study questions the popular stereotype that women are more risk averse than men in their financial investment decisions. The analysis is based on micro-level data from large-scale surveys of private households in five European countries. In our analysis of investment decisions, we directly...