Ambiguity Attitudes and Social Interactions: An Experimental Investigation

Gary Charness, Edi Karni and Dan Levin ()

Economics Working Paper Archive from The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper reports the results of experiments designed to test (a) whether and to what extent individuals display non-neutral ambiguity attitudes in their choice behavior and (b) if and how do ambiguity attitudes change as a result of interpersonal interactions and persuasion. To address the first question we designed and conducted experiments involving individual choice between betting on ambiguous and unambiguous events of their choice. We found that a large majority of subjects display ambiguity-neutral attitudes, many others display ambiguity-incoherent attitudes, and few subjects display either ambiguity-averse attitudes or ambiguity-seeking attitudes. To address the second question we introduced a new experimental design with a built-in incentive to persuade. We found that interpersonal interactions without incentive to persuade have no effect on behavior, but when incentives were introduced, the ambiguity-neutral subjects were better able to persuade ambiguity seeking and ambiguity-incoherent subjects to follow ambiguity-neutral choice behavior. No such influence was detected with respect to ambiguity-neutral subjects.

Date: 2012-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ2.jhu.edu/REPEC/papers/wp590_karni.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ambiguity attitudes and social interactions: An experimental investigation (2013)
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:jhu:papers:590

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Paper Archive from The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics 3400 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Humphrey Muturi ().