Ranoua Bouchouicha’s research while affiliated with University of Reading and other places

Gender effects in risk taking have attracted much attention by economists, and remain debated. Loss aversion—the stylized finding that a given loss carries substantially greater weight than a monetarily equivalent gain—is a fundamental driver of risk aversion. We deploy four definitions of loss aversion commonly used in the literature to investigate gender effects. Even though the definitions only differ in subtle ways, we find women to be more loss averse than men according to one definition, while another definition results in no gender differences, and the remaining two definitions point to women being less loss averse than men. Conceptually, these contradictory effects can be organized by systematic measurement error resulting from model mis-specifications relative to the true underlying decision process.

Recent papers have modeled the prevalence of risk-tolerance as shaped by growth, making testable predictions about the distribution of risk-tolerance across the globe. We test these predictions using a dataset containing a survey question capturing people’s risk-tolerance for representative samples from 78 countries. We find a negative between-country correlation between risk-tolerance and GDP per capita. Together with the positive within-country correlation between risk-tolerance and income, this results in a risk-income paradox. We further find a negative interaction effect of risk-tolerance and GDP on fertility. These findings provide support for endogenous-preference models of economic growth.

One of the stylized facts underlying prospect theory is a fourfold pattern of risk preferences. People have been shown to be risk seeking for small probability gains and large probability losses, while being risk averse for large probability gains and small probability losses. Another fourfold pattern of risk preferences over outcomes, postulated by Harry Markowitz in 1952, has received much less attention and is currently not integrated into prospect theory. In two experiments, we show that risk preferences may change over outcomes. While we find people to be risk seeking for small outcomes, this turns to risk neutrality and later risk aversion as stakes increase. We then show how a one-parameter logarithmic utility function fits such stake effects significantly better under prospect theory than the power or exponential functions mostly used when fitting prospect theory models. We further investigate the extent to which the use of ill-suited functional forms to represent utility may result in violations of prospect theory, and whether such violations disappear when using logarithmic utility.

Attitudes towards risk and uncertainty have been indicated to be highly context-dependent, and to be sensitive to the measurement technique employed. We present data collected in controlled experiments with 2,939 subjects in 30 countries measuring risk and uncertainty attitudes through incentivized measures as well as survey questions. Our data show clearly that measures correlate not only within decision contexts or measurement methods, but also across contexts and methods. This points to the existence of one underlying “risk preference”, which influences attitudes independently of the measurement method or choice domain. We furthermore find that answers to a general and a financial survey question correlate with incentivized lottery choices in most countries. Incentivized and survey measures also correlate significantly between countries. This opens the possibility to conduct cultural comparisons on risk attitudes using survey instruments.