Willingness to take risk: The role of risk conception and optimism

Thomas Dohmen, Simone Quercia and Jana Willrodt ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of personality and that it predicts real-life risk taking. The general risk question captures this disposition alongside pure risk preference. This enlightens why the general risk question is a better predictor of behavior under risk across different domains than measures of pure risk preference. Our results also rationalize why risk taking is related to optimism.

Keywords: risk taking behavior; optimism; preference measures; risk conception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D81 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hpe, nep-rmg and nep-upt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Willingness to Take Risk: The Role of Risk Conception and Optimism (2019)
Working Paper: Willingness to take risk: The role of risk conception and optimism (2018)
Working Paper: Willingness to Take Risk: The Role of Risk Conception and Optimism (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2018_023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office ().