The origin of prospect theory is the desire to test the intuitive statistician in the real world. The development of this theory by the cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky can be traced to the former's work in cognitive psychophysics, in which deviations from average behavior are termed...

We examine the risky choices of contestants in the popular TV game show “Deal or No Deal” and related classroom experiments. Contrary to the traditional view of expected utility theory, the choices can be explained in large part by previous outcomes experienced during the game. Risk aversion...

We explore situations in which a decision-maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own. For gains we confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion, while in the loss domain we find increased risk seeking. In a...