Radon exposure in homes is a leading cause of lung cancer, but the rate at which householders test for it is low. In a pre-registered experiment with a nationally representative sample of adults (N = 1,700), we used psychological theory to design interventions to increase perceived risk from...

Risk aversion is to many economists synonymous with the curvature of utility over consumption. Yet if information acquisition is costly then agents have another reason to be averse to risk: the cost of reducing this uncertainty. This paper shows that this additional reason for risk aversion...

This paper investigates risk preference at older ages in 14 European countries. Older individuals report greater risk aversion. Using the longitudinal nature of the data we are able to show this relationship between risk preferences and age is not due to cohort effects or selective mortality. We...

We compile, generalize and extend the results about the comparative static effects of risk changes on optimal risk-reduction and saving behavior. We use the time-separable discounted expected-utility model and consider income risk, inflation risk, and interest rate risk. For each type of risk,...

We refine the understanding of individual preferences across social lotteries, whereby the payoffs of a pair of subjects are exposed to random shocks. We find that aggregate behavior is ex-post and ex-ante inequality averse, but also that there is a wide variety of individual preferences and...

We propose a new paradigm to study coordination in complex social systems, such as financial markets, that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. This new context has features from prediction markets that have been shown previously to mitigate price bubbles in classical asset market experiments....

We analyse the decision of an agent to invest in new industrial activities the con- sequences of which on people's health and the environment are initially unknown. The agent does not have the possibility of delaying her/his investment but s/he gets the opportunity to acquire information in...

We propose to analyse the hyperbolic discounting preferences effect on the innovator's research investment decision. Investing in research allows him to acquire information, and then to reduce the uncertainty of the risks of his project. We find that whatever the innovator's preferences, that is...

This paper presents the results of an experiment that demonstrates that personality may have a significant impact on economic decision making under uncertainty. This impact is indirect since differences in personality characteristics lead decision makers to seek different types of information...

Uncertainties as to future supply costs of nonrenewable natural resources, such as oil and gas, raise the issue of the choice of supply sources. In a perfectly deterministic world, an efficient use of multiple sources of supply requires that any given market exhausts the supply it can draw from...