Gender Differences in Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion This paper demonstrates gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. It also contributes to a growing literature relating economic preference parameters to psychological measures by asking whether variations in preference parameters among persons, and in particular across genders, can be accounted for by differences in pe...

This paper is the first to apply prospect theory to societal health-related decision making. In particular, we allow for utility curvature, equity weighting, sign-dependence, and loss aversion in choices concerning quality of life of other people. We find substantial inequity aversion, both for gains and losses, which can be attributed to both diminishing marginal utility and differential weigh...

How does one measure financial risk aversion for a rural individual that has no knowledge of financial products? What household variables influence financial risk aversion? To answer this question, this study implemented Biswanger’s Lottery with an added gains and losses competent, in a series of six games, on a sample of 45 individuals drawn from two villages in rural India. For each participa...

Two experiments were run to evaluate the role of acetaldehyde and the area postrema in the acquisition of an ethanol-induced conditioned taste aversion. An ethanol-induced taste aversion was observed in male Sprague-Dawley rats with a dose of 4 g/kg. PO, but not after doses of 1 or 2 g/kg. Pretreatment with 4-methylpyrazole (8 mg/kg, IP), which itself did not induce an aversion as compared to p...

This paper reports the results of a detailed investigation of the risk-averse and loss-averse behaviour of UK individual investors. An one-period analytical model of investing behaviour is developed to explore the differences between individuals who are risk averse, and those whose behaviour is better described by Kahneman & Tversky’s Prospect Theory. Questionnaire data on risk perceptions is u...

Decision making with adaptive utility provides a generalisation to classical Bayesian decision theory, allowing the creation of a normative theory for decision selection when preferences are initially uncertain. In this paper we address some of the foundational issues of adaptive utility as seen from the perspective of a Bayesian statistician. The implications that such a generalisation has upo...

We study behavior in a moonlighting game with unequal initial endowments. In this game, predictions for second-mover behavior based on inequality aversion are in contrast to reciprocity. We find that inequality aversion explains only few observations. The comparison to a treatment with equal endowments supports the conclusion that behavior is better captured by intuitive notions of reciprocity ...

In a pair of experiments, we have compared the ability of changes of place (Exp. 1) and changes of time of day (Exp. 2) to separately modulate learned saline-aversion memory phenomena in rats. Neither a spatial nor a temporal change disrupted latent inhibition using the present behavioral procedure. However, pre-exposure to the taste increased the contextual control of the learned aversion expr...

We analyze the policy implications of aversion to Knightian uncertainty (or ambiguity) about the possibility of tipping points. We demonstrate two channels through which uncertainty aversion affects optimal policy in the general setting. The first channel relates to the policy’s effect on the probability of tipping, and the second channel to its differential impact in the preand post-tipping re...