Attitudes Toward Uncertainty Among the Poor: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

Alpaslan Akay (alpaslan.akay@economics.gu.se), Peter Martinsson, Haileselassie Medhin and Stefan Trautmann

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: We looked at risk and ambiguity attitudes among Ethiopian peasants in one of the poorest regions of the world and compared their attitudes to a standard Western university student sample elicited by the same decision task. Strong risk aversion and ambiguity aversion were found with the Ethiopian peasants, and these attitudes are similar to those of the university students. Testing for the effect of socioeconomic variables on uncertainty attitudes showed that poor health increased both risk and ambiguity aversion.

Keywords: risk attitudes; ambiguity attitudes; poverty; cultural differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D81 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr and nep-upt
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Working Paper: Attitudes toward Uncertainty among the Poor: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia (2009)
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