BACKGROUND Past research linked Toxoplasma gondii (TG) infection in humans with neurological and mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and attention disorders), irregularities of the dopaminergic and testosterone system, and increased likelihood of being involved in traffic accidents. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We test for an association between TG infection and finan...

BACKGROUND Abnormalities in perception and evaluation of body shape are a hallmark of eating disorders. METHODS Brain responses to line drawings of underweight, normal weight, and overweight female bodies were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging in 9 women with bulimia nervosa, 13 with anorexia nervosa, and 18 healthy women. Participants rated the stimuli for fear and disgust....

Bargaining problems are considered where the preferences of the bargainers deviate from expected utility but can be modelled according to rank dependent utility theory. Under rank dependent utility both the utility function and the probability weighting function influence the risk attitude of a decision maker. The same definition of risk aversion leads to two forms of risk aversion: utility ris...

Myopic loss aversion was suggested by Benartzi and Thaler (1995) as the main explanation for the equity premium puzzle. We investigate the impact of myopic loss aversion on actual investment decisions of 400 Dutch individual investors, covered by the Dutch National Bank Household Survey. We find that higher loss aversion is associated with a lower share of investments in risky assets. The inves...

Defined as increased sensitivity to losses, loss aversion is often conceptualized as a cognitive bias. However, findings that loss aversion has an attentional or emotional regulation component suggest that it may instead reflect differences in information processing. To distinguish these alternatives, we applied the drift-diffusion model (DDM) to choice and response time (RT) data in a card gam...

Loss aversion refers to the fact that people are distinctively more sensitive to losses than to gains. Loss averse agents are very risk averse around the reference point and exhibit asymmetric responses to positive and negative income shocks. In an otherwise standard RBC model, I study loss aversion in both consumption alone and consumption-and-leisure together. My results indicate that how los...

Loss aversion is considered a general pervasive bias occurring regardless of context or person making the decision. We hypothesized that conscientiousness would predict an aversion to losses in the financial domain. We index loss aversion by the relative impact of income losses and gains on life satisfaction. In a representative German sample (N = 105,558: replicated in a British sample, N = 33...

We propose that ambiguity aversion, as introduced in the literature on decision-making under uncertainty, drives a preference for established brands in multi-attribute choices among branded alternatives. Established brands are those for which belief in quality is held with greater confidence, even if specific attributes might be inferior to those of competing, less-established brands. In five e...