Randomize at your own risk: on the observability of ambiguity aversion

Aurelien Baillon (), Yoram Halevy and Chen Li

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: Facing several decisions, people may consider each one in isolation or integrate them into a single optimization problem. Isolation and integration may yield different choices, for instance, if uncertainty is involved, and only one randomly selected decision is implemented. We investigate whether the random incentive system in experiments that measure ambiguity aversion provides a hedge against ambiguity, making ambiguity-averse subjects who integrate behave as if they were ambiguity neutral. Our results suggest that about half of the ambiguity averse subjects integrated their choices in the experiment into a single problem, whereas the other half isolated. Our design further enable us to disentangle properties of the integrating subjects' preferences over compound objects induced by the random incentive system and the choice problems in the experiment.

Keywords: hedging; random incentives; Ellsberg; ambiguity aversion; design of experiments; integration; isolation; narrow bracketing; narrow framing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C91 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: Unknown pages
Date: 2021-11-15
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 (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-712.pdf Main Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Randomize at Your Own Risk: On the Observability of Ambiguity Aversion (2022)
Working Paper: Randomize at Your Own Risk: On the Observability of Ambiguity Aversion (2022)
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:tor:tecipa:tecipa-712

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().