Holzmeister Felix, Stefan Matthias
Department of Economics, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.
Department of Banking and Finance, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.
Exp Econ. 2021;24(2):593-616. doi: 10.1007/s10683-020-09674-8. Epub 2020 Sep 12.
With the rise of experimental research in the social sciences, numerous methods to elicit and classify people's risk attitudes in the laboratory have evolved. However, evidence suggests that attitudes towards risk may vary considerably when measured with different methods. Based on a within-subject experimental design using four widespread risk preference elicitation tasks, we find that the different methods indeed give rise to considerably varying estimates of individual and aggregate level risk preferences. Conducting simulation exercises to obtain benchmarks for subjects' behavior, we find that the observed heterogeneity in risk preference estimates across methods is qualitatively similar to the heterogeneity arising from independent random draws from the choice distributions observed in the experiment. Our study, however, provides evidence that subjects are surprisingly well aware of the variation in the riskiness of their choices. We argue that this calls into question the common interpretation of variation in revealed risk preferences as being inconsistent.
随着社会科学实验研究的兴起，在实验室中引出并分类人们风险态度的众多方法不断发展。然而，有证据表明，当用不同方法测量时，对风险的态度可能有很大差异。基于一项采用四个广泛使用的风险偏好引出任务的主体内实验设计，我们发现不同方法确实会导致对个体和总体层面风险偏好的估计有很大差异。通过进行模拟练习以获得受试者行为的基准，我们发现不同方法间风险偏好估计中观察到的异质性在性质上与实验中观察到的选择分布的独立随机抽样所产生的异质性相似。然而，我们的研究提供了证据表明受试者惊人地清楚其选择风险的变化。我们认为，这对将显示出的风险偏好变化解释为不一致的常见观点提出了质疑。
