The Nature of Risk Preferences: Evidence from Insurance Choices

Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, Ted O'Donoghue and Joshua Teitelbaum

No 3933, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We use data on insurance deductible choices to estimate a structural model of risky choice that incorporates "standard" risk aversion (diminishing marginal utility for wealth) and probability distortions. We find that probability distortions - characterized by substantial overweighting of small probabilities and only mild insensitivity to probability changes - play an important role in explaining the aversion to risk manifested in deductible choices. This finding is robust to allowing for observed and unobserved heterogeneity in preferences. We demonstrate that neither Kõszegi-Rabin loss aversion alone nor Gul disappointment aversion alone can explain our estimated probability distortions, signifying a key role for probability weighting.

JEL-codes: D01 D03 D12 D81 G22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3933.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
Journal Article: The Nature of Risk Preferences: Evidence from Insurance Choices (2013)
Working Paper: The Nature of Risk Preferences: Evidence from Insurance Choices (2011)
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:ces:ceswps:_3933

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().