Measuring individual risk attitudes in the lab: Task or ask? An empirical comparison
(2015) In Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 119. p.254-266- Abstract
- This paper reports on an empirical comparison of two prominent measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen et al. (2011) - with respect to their within-subject stability over time (one year) and their correlation with actual risk-taking behavior in the lab - here the amount sent in a trust game (Berg et al., 1995). Our results suggest that the two risk attitude measures are at best only weakly correlated. Only the questionnaire measure shows high test-retest stability, while virtually no such stability is found in the lottery-choice task. In addition, only the questionnaire measure shows the expected correlations with a Big Five personality... (More)
- This paper reports on an empirical comparison of two prominent measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen et al. (2011) - with respect to their within-subject stability over time (one year) and their correlation with actual risk-taking behavior in the lab - here the amount sent in a trust game (Berg et al., 1995). Our results suggest that the two risk attitude measures are at best only weakly correlated. Only the questionnaire measure shows high test-retest stability, while virtually no such stability is found in the lottery-choice task. In addition, only the questionnaire measure shows the expected correlations with a Big Five personality measure and is correlated with actual risk-taking behavior. With respect to behavior in the trust game, we find a high retest stability of transfers. This supports the conjecture that trusting behavior has a component which itself is a stable individual characteristic. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/8548673
- author
- Lonnqvist, Jan-Erik ; Verkasalo, Markku ; Walkowitz, Gari and Wichardt, Philipp LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2015
- type
- Contribution to journal
- publication status
- published
- subject
- keywords
- Risk attitudes, Trust, Personality, Lab experiments
- in
- Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
- volume
- 119
- pages
- 254 - 266
- publisher
- Elsevier
- external identifiers
-
- wos:000366958800017
- scopus:84941281852
- ISSN
- 0167-2681
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.08.003
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- 5a129207-facf-4df3-ae8a-f17043945840 (old id 8548673)
- date added to LUP
- 2016-04-01 14:42:46
- date last changed
- 2022-04-14 19:12:34
@article{5a129207-facf-4df3-ae8a-f17043945840,
abstract = {{This paper reports on an empirical comparison of two prominent measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen et al. (2011) - with respect to their within-subject stability over time (one year) and their correlation with actual risk-taking behavior in the lab - here the amount sent in a trust game (Berg et al., 1995). Our results suggest that the two risk attitude measures are at best only weakly correlated. Only the questionnaire measure shows high test-retest stability, while virtually no such stability is found in the lottery-choice task. In addition, only the questionnaire measure shows the expected correlations with a Big Five personality measure and is correlated with actual risk-taking behavior. With respect to behavior in the trust game, we find a high retest stability of transfers. This supports the conjecture that trusting behavior has a component which itself is a stable individual characteristic. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.}},
author = {{Lonnqvist, Jan-Erik and Verkasalo, Markku and Walkowitz, Gari and Wichardt, Philipp}},
issn = {{0167-2681}},
keywords = {{Risk attitudes; Trust; Personality; Lab experiments}},
language = {{eng}},
pages = {{254--266}},
publisher = {{Elsevier}},
series = {{Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization}},
title = {{Measuring individual risk attitudes in the lab: Task or ask? An empirical comparison}},
url = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.08.003}},
doi = {{10.1016/j.jebo.2015.08.003}},
volume = {{119}},
year = {{2015}},
}