Social comparison and gender differences in risk taking

Ulrich Schmidt, Andreas Friedl and Katharina Lima de Miranda

No 2011, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: The present paper contributes to the controversy regarding gender differences in risk taking by investigating the impact of social comparison. Social comparison is formalized by integrating a social reference point into the model of Köszegi and Rabin. Drawing on previous results from evolutionary biology, we hypothesize that men (women) focus more on relative (absolute) income, i.e., the relative weight of social gain-loss utility is higher for men than for women. Our model predicts that risk taking is higher for correlated than for uncorrelated risks and that this effect is stronger for men than for women. These predictions are confirmed by a simple classroom experiment. We conclude that social comparison and the correlation of risks play an important role in the discussion of gender differences in risk taking.

Keywords: risk taking; gender differences; correlation of risks; social reference point (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D81 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-dem, nep-exp and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/121500/1/83802887X.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:ifwkwp:2011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().