Are risk preferences stable ? A field experiment in Congo Basin countries

Marielle Brunette (marielle.brunette@inrae.fr) and Jonas Ngouhouo-Poufoun

Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg

Abstract: We compare individual risk preferences elicited through a classic Ordered Lottery Selection (OLS) procedure with five gambles, and an extended procedure composed of nine gambles. The research question is about the stability of the risk preferences across these two elicitation variants. We implemented a field experiment with 1002 rural households in the Congo Basin from December 2013 to July 2014. We show that 1/3 of the sample is extremely risk averse regardless of the procedure. We found inconsistencies in risk preferences elicited across procedures. Indeed, 45.71% are characterized by instability of preferences, either weak (34.53%) or strong (11.18%); 42.81% of the sample exhibits stable preferences and the remaining 11.48% of the sample - initially risk neutral in the classic procedure - is classified as risk loving in the extended procedure. Undereducation can be seen as the main driver of the strong instability since the incremental change brought about by the attainment of secondary school on the likelihood to remain stable is ten times greater than the other considered drivers.

Keywords: field experiment; risk aversion; ordered lottery selection; preferences; farmers. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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:

Downloads: (external link)
http://beta.u-strasbg.fr/WP/2019/2019-18.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:ulp:sbbeta:2019-18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (webmaster@cournot.u-strasbg.fr this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).