Do Positive Externalities Affect Risk Taking? Experimental Evidence on Gender and Group Membership

Carina Cavalcanti () and Andreas Leibbrandt
Additional contact information
Carina Cavalcanti: Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, Griffith University, Southport and Nathan, QLD, Australia.

No 2024-05, Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Many positive externalities are created by risk-taking. We investigate whether risk-taking is affected by the presence of positive externalities. In our experiments, we study choices between investments in technologies that differ according to their level of risk and the extent to which they generate positive externalities for others. We find that even large positive externalities have little to no impact on individual risk-taking. We also find that women are generally less willing to take risks than men in the absence and presence of positive externalities and that they generate fewer positive externalities if they increase with risk but more positive externalities if they decrease with risk. Finally, we observe that groups invest more in technologies with larger positive externalities and that this is mainly driven by male group members. These findings provide a comprehensive view on the malleability of risk-taking in the presence of positive externalities.

Keywords: Risk aversion; positive externality; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D81 H23 J17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://monash-econ-wps.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws ... s/moswps/2024-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:mos:moswps:2024-05

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.e ... esearch/publications

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simon Angus ().