In this paper, we relax the hard closure property of experiments that have been used to study endowment effect in laboratory. We study differences in benchmark environments (hard closure) and an environment that allows participants to reverse the decisions taken in the laboratory (soft closure)....

Decision makers often take risky decisions on the behalf of others rather than for themselves. Competing theoretical models predict both, higher as well as lower levels of risk aversion when taking risk for others, and the experimental evidence is mixed. In our within-subject design, money...

This experimental study is concerned with the impact of the timing of the resolution of risk onpeople's willingness to take risks, with a special focus on the role of affect. While the importanceof anticipatory emotions has so far been only inferred from decisions regarding hypothetical...

From the viewpoint of the independence axiom of expected utility theory, an interesting empirical dynamic choice problem involves the presence of a “global risk,” that is, a chance of losing everything whichever safe or risky option is chosen. In this experimental study, participants have to...

Does adverse selection hamper the effectiveness of voluntary risk sharing? How do differences in risk profiles affect adverse selection? We experimentally investigate individuals ́willingness to share risks with others. Across treatments we vary how risk profiles differ between individuals. We...

This paper explores the effect of personality traits on: (1) the willingness to make risk-taking decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the nature of "choice shifts", i.e. the difference between the amount of risk taken in the group context and individually. Openness and agreeableness emerge as...

Prospect theory (PT) is the dominant descriptive theory of decision making under risk today. For the modeling of choices, PT relies on a psychologically founded separation of risk attitudes into attitudes towards outcomes, captured in a value function; and attitudes towards probabilities,...

Auctions often involve goods exhibiting a common knowledge ex-post risk that is independent of buyers' private values or their signals regarding common value components. Esö and White (2004) showed theoretically that ex-post risk leads to precautionary bidding for DARA bidders: Agents reduce...

We investigate one possible explanation for corrupt behavior namely that individual decision makers who engage frequently in illegal actions might underestimate the overall probability of being caught. This might be in particular true for petty corruption where small amounts of bribes are...