Robust inference in risk elicitation tasks

Ola Andersson*, Håkan J. Holm, Jean Robert Tyran, Erik Wengström

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

19 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recent experimental evidence suggests that noisy behavior correlates strongly with personal characteristics. Since decision noise leads to bias in most elicitation tasks, there is a risk of falsely interpreting noise-driven relationships as preference driven. This puts previous studies that found a negative relation between personality measures and risk aversion into perspective and in particular raises the question of how to achieve robust inference in this domain. This paper shows, by way of an economic experiment with subjects from all walks of life, that using structural estimation to model heterogeneity of noise in combination with a balanced design allows us to mitigate the bias problem. Our estimations show that cognitive ability is related to noisy behavior rather than risk preferences. We also find age and education to be strongly related to noise, but the personality characteristics obtained using the Big Five inventory are less related to noise and more robustly correlated to risk preferences.
Original languageEnglish
Peer-reviewed scientific journalJournal of Risk and Uncertainty
Volume61
Pages (from-to)195-209
ISSN0895-5646
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10.12.2020
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article - refereed

Keywords

  • 511 Economics
  • risk preference
  • cognitive ability
  • expriment
  • noie
  • structural estimation

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