“Safe assets” is a catch-all term for financial contracts that market participants treat as if they were risk-free. These may include government debt, AAA corporate debt, bank debt, and asset-backed securities, among others. The International Monetary Fund estimated potential safe assets at...

We investigate the theoretically proposed link between judgmental overconfidence and trading activity. In addition to applying classical measures of miscalibration, we introduce a measure to capture misperception of signal reliability, which is the relevant bias in the theoretical overconfidence...

This paper presents the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), an intuitive procedure aimed at measuring risk attitudes. Subjects decide how many boxes to collect out of 100, one of which containing a bomb. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes accumulated but are zero if the bomb is...

We propose a method to measure the intensity of risk aversion, prudence (downside risk aversion) and temperance (outer risk aversion) in experiments. Higher-order risk compensations are defined within the proper risk apportionment model of Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger [American Economic Review, 96...

We examine in an experiment the causes, consequences and possible cures of myopic loss aversion (MLA) for investment behaviour under risk. We find that both, investment horizons and feedback frequency contribute almost equally to the effects of MLA. Longer investment horizons and less frequent...

This paper experimentally investigates whether risk-averse individuals punish less if the outcome of punishment is uncertain than when it is certain. Our design includes three treatments: Baseline in which the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game is played; Certain Punishment in which the...

In an aging society, it becomes more and more important to understand how aging affects decision making. Older adults have to face many situations that require consequential financial decisions. In the present study, we examined the effects of aging on decisions in two domains of uncertainty:...

This study attempts to combine two traditional fields in microeconomics: individual decision making under risk and decision making in an interpersonal context. The influence of social comparison on risky choices is explored in an experiment in which participants make a series of choices between...

Social preference models were originally constructed to explain two things: why people spend money to affect the earnings of others and why the income of others influences reported happiness. We test these models in a novel experimental situation where participants face a risky decision that...

A key open question for theories of reference-dependent preferences is what determines the reference point. One candidate is expectations: what people expect could affect how they feel about what actually occurs. In a real-effort experiment, we manipulate the rational expectations of subjects...