Risk attitudes and digit ratio (2D:4D): Evidence from prospect theory

Levent Neyse (), Ferdinand Vieider (), Patrick Ring, Catharina Probst, Christian Kaernbach, Thilo van Eimeren and Ulrich Schmidt

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2020, issue 60, 29-51

Abstract: Prenatal androgens have organizational effects on brain and endocrine system development, which may have a partial impact on economic decisions. Numerous studies have investigated the relationship between prenatal testosterone and financial risk taking, yet results remain inconclusive. We suspect that this is due to difficulty in capturing risk preferences with expected utility based tasks. Prospect theory, on the other hand, suggests that risk preferences differ between gains, losses and mixed prospects, as well as for different probability levels. This study investigates the relationship between financial risk taking and 2D:4D, a putative marker of prenatal testosterone exposure, in the framework of prospect theory. We conducted our study with 350 participants of Caucasian and Asian ethnicities. We do not observe any significant relationship between 2D:4D and risk taking in either of these domains and ethnicities.

Keywords: Prospect theory; Prenatal testosterone; Digit ratiio; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D81 D87 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/222433/1/N ... ndDigitRatio2D4D.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Risk attitudes and digit ratio (2D:4D): Evidence from prospect theory (2020)
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:zbw:espost:222433

DOI: 10.1007/s11166-020-09321-w

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().