Dealing with risk: Gender, stakes, and probability effects

Irene Comeig, Charles Holt and Ainhoa Jaramillo-Gutiérrez

No 215, Discussion Papers in Economic Behaviour from University of Valencia, ERI-CES

Abstract: This paper investigates how subjects deal with financial risk, both "upside" (with a small chance of a high payoff) and "downside" (with a small chance of a low payoff). We find that the same people who avoid risk in the downside setting tend to make more risky choices in the upside one. The experiment is designed to disentangle the probability-weighting and utility-curvature components of risk attitudes, and to differentiate settings in which gender differences arise from those in which they do not. Women are more risk averse for downside risks, but gender differences are diminished for upside risks.

Keywords: risk aversion; probability weighting; rank-dependent utility; gender differences; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 G02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dbe:wpaper:0215

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