In the dominant approach, it is assumed that risk preferences reflect the shape of utility function. Here, the alternative approach is, in which risk preferences are result of: (1) individual differences in focus on either potential or security that impacts decision weights put to good and bad...

Conventional wisdom suggests that optimism should be positively associated with risk taking. However, this has hardly been directly tested in the laboratory. In this paper, we report an experiment regarding risk perception and risk taking. Our data supports the hypothesis that two sufficient...