Building on previous studies on perceptions of inequality, welfare and risk we investigate the structure of individuals' rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. We examine three interlinked propositions that are fundamental to the standard economic approach to risk: (i) that rankings by risk are simply the reverse of ranking by preference over distributions with a given mean; (ii) that risk-rankings respect the principle of mean-preserving spreads; (iii) that risk-rankings are independent of whether the individual is personally involved in the gains/losses associated with the uncertain prospects. To do this we use a set of questionnaires implemented through the Virtual Laboratory, a novel experimental setting for the study of normative issues in experimental economics. The results from the questionnaires provide an evaluation of the similitude between individual perceptions of risk and theoretical axioms. They also help identify the individual characteristics that might affect such perceptions.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: