Measuring individual risk attitudes in the lab: Task or ask? An empirical comparison

Jan-Erik Lönnqvist, Markku Verkasalo, Gari Walkowitz and Philipp C. Wichardt

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2015, vol. 119, issue C, 254-266

Abstract: This paper reports on an empirical comparison of two prominent measures of individual risk attitudes – the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen et al. (2011) – with respect to their within-subject stability over time (one year) and their correlation with actual risk-taking behavior in the lab – here the amount sent in a trust game (Berg et al., 1995). Our results suggest that the two risk attitude measures are at best only weakly correlated. Only the questionnaire measure shows high test–retest stability, while virtually no such stability is found in the lottery-choice task. In addition, only the questionnaire measure shows the expected correlations with a Big Five personality measure and is correlated with actual risk-taking behavior. With respect to behavior in the trust game, we find a high retest stability of transfers. This supports the conjecture that trusting behavior has a component which itself is a stable individual characteristic.

Keywords: Risk attitudes; Trust; Personality; Lab experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D81 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (125)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268115002115
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jeborg:v:119:y:2015:i:c:p:254-266

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.08.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().