Single-sex classes within coeducational environments are likely to modify students’ risk-taking attitudes in economically important ways. To test this, we designed a controlled experiment using first year college students who made choices over real-stakes lotteries at two distinct dates....

In this paper we utilise data from a unique new birth‐cohort study to see how the risk preferences of young people are affected by cognitive skills and gender. We find that cognitive ability (measured by the percentile ranking for university entrance at age 18) has no effect on risk...

Rational choice theory stretches out in two complementary directions. Its contextual and extensive application fills and then overflows the strict domain of substantive economy, eventually identifying any human choice with an economic decision. Its structural and intensive sophistication...

This paper analyzes increased risk aversion in the presence of two risks. Necessary and sufficient conditions for increased risk aversion across the domain of the foreground risk are found for changes in both the foreground and background risks. Preferences that satisfy the necessary and...

Unpredictable behavior is central to optimal play in many strategic situations because predictable patterns leave players vulnerable to exploitation. A theory of unpredictable behavior based on differential complexity constraints is presented in the context of repeated two-person zero-sum games....

Harstad and Selten’s article in this forum performs a valuable service by highlighting the dominance of optimization-based models over boundedly rational models in modern microeconomics, and questioning whether optimization-based models are a better way forward than boundedly rational...

If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this...

What is the relationship between degrees of belief and (all-or-nothing) beliefs? Can the latter be expressed as a function of the former, without running into paradoxes? We reassess this “belief-binarization” problem from the perspective of judgmentaggregation theory. Although some...

Using hypothetical lottery choices to measure risk preferences, Frederick (2005) finds that higher cognitive ability is associated with less risk aversion. This paper documents, however, that when using an incentive compatible measure of risk preference, attitudes towards risk are not associated...

We define a behavioral concept of relevance in the context of decision making under uncertainty.  We argue that this concept provides a sensible answer to the question "What probabilistic environments do an individuals' preferences reveal as mattering to her decisions?" under a symmetry...