Effects Of Stress On Economic Decision-Making: Evidence From Laboratory Experiments

Liam Delaney, Günther Fink and Colm Harmon

No 2014-03, Working Papers from University of Sydney, School of Economics

Abstract: The ways in which preferences respond to the varying stress of economic environments is a key question for behavioral economics and public policy. We conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the effects of stress on financial decision making among individuals aged 50 and older. Using the cold pressor task as a physiological stressor, and a series of intelligence tests as cognitive stressors, we find that stress increases subjective discounting rates, has no effect on the degree of risk-aversion, and substantially lowers the effort individuals make to learn about financial decisions.

Keywords: stress; financial decisions; discounting; risk aversion; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ-wpseries.com/2014/201403.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to econ-wpseries.com:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Working Paper: Effects of stress on economic decision-making: Evidence from laboratory experiments (2014)
Working Paper: Effects of Stress on Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from Laboratory Experiments (2014)
Working Paper: Effects of stress on economic decision-making: Evidence from laboratory experiments (2014)
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:syd:wpaper:2014-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Sydney, School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vanessa Holcombe ().