Measuring Risk Aversion with Lists: A New Bias

Joaquim Silvestre and Antoni Bosch-Domènech

No 634, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: Various experimental procedures aimed at measuring individual risk aversion involve a list of pairs of alternative prospects. We first study the widely used method by Holt and Laury (2002), for which we find that the removal of some items from the lists yields a systematic decrease in risk aversion. This bias is quite distinct from other confounds that have been previously observed in the use of the Holt and Laury method. It may be related to empirical phenomena and theoretical developments where better prospects increase risk aversion. Nevertheless, we have also found that the more recent elicitation method due to Abdellaoui et al. (2011), also based on lists, does not display any statistically significant bias when the corresponding items of the list are removed. Our results suggest that methods other than the popular Holt and Laury one may be preferable for the measurement of risk aversion.

Keywords: experiments; risk preferences; measurement of risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring risk aversion with lists: a new bias (2013)
Working Paper: Measuring risk aversion with lists: A new bias (2012)
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