Is Human Life Worth Peanuts? Risk Attitude Changes in Accordance with Varying Stakes

Kazumi Shimizu and Daisuke Udagawa
Additional contact information
Daisuke Udagawa: Faculty of Economics, Hannan University

No 1518, Working Papers from Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics

Abstract: The “peanuts effect,” which states that people are more willing to gamble when playing for "peanuts" (a small outcome), has been stably observed in the context of a small monetary stake. We conducted 2 experiments to verify whether the peanuts effect still occurred when the type of stakes changed. Our results showed that people tend to gamble more for a qualitatively smaller value when the stake is material in nature, but are less willing to take a risk for a smaller value when the stake is a human life. This risk attitude change may support the contingent weighting model.

Keywords: peanuts effect; life-or-death decision; contingent weighting model; risk attitude; disappointment; monetary stakes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.waseda.jp/fpse/winpec/assets/uploads/20 ... 8Shimizu_Udagawa.pdf First version, (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is human life worth peanuts? Risk attitude changes in accordance with varying stakes (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:wap:wpaper:1518

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Haruko Noguchi ().