We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of...

Negative income shocks can either be the consequence of risky choices or random events. A growing literature analyzes the role of responsibility for neediness for informal financial support of individuals facing negative income shocks based on randomized experiments. In this paper, we show that...

This paper provides experimental evidence of the role of higher order risk attitudes — especially prudence — in prevention behavior. Prudence, under an expected utility framework, increases (decreases) self-protection effort compared to the risk neutral level when the risk of losing part of...

Personal decisions about health hazards are the main cause of impaired health and premature death. People smoke and eat too much and exercise too little. The lack of preventive efforts is surprising given their proven effectiveness. Arrow's (1963) classical paper suggested that moral hazard...

Economic preferences – like time, risk and social preferences – have been shown to be very influential for real-life outcomes, such as educational achievements, labor market outcomes, or health status. We contribute to the recent literature that has examined how and when economic preferences...

This paper analyzes experimentally whether responsibility sharing can reduce the emotionally motivated aspiration to bias beliefs toward previous decisions and whether this influences the subsequent investment behavior. The results suggest that decision-makers tend to form beliefs that justify...

We explore the implications of ambiguity for the pricing of credit default swaps (CDSs). A model of heterogeneous investors with independent preferences for ambiguity and risk shows that, since CDS contracts are assets in zero net supply, the net credit risk exposure of the marginal investor...

This paper explores the relationship between linguistic variation and individual attitudes toward risk and uncertainty. We propose an innovative marker that classifies languages according to the number of non-indicative moods in the grammatical contexts involving uncertainty. We find that...

We provide a model that can explain empirically relevant variations in confidence and risk taking by combining horizon-dependent risk aversion (“anxiety”) and selective memory in a Bayesian intrapersonal game. In the time series, overconfidence is more prevalent when actual risk levels are...

The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm in applied microeconomics. However, as is well known, it...