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Getting Used to Risks: Reference Dependence and Risk Inclusion

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Author Info
Astrid Matthey

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Abstract

Experimental and field evidence show that people perceive and evaluate new risks differently from risks that are common. In particular, people get used to the presence of certain risks and become less eager to avoid them. We explain this observation by including risks in the reference states of individuals, which requires a more general concept of the reference state than has previously been considered in the literature. We find two effects. First, the inclusion of the risk in the reference state changes its evaluation. A risk being present on the market induces a self-enforcing process of increasing acceptance of this risk without any new information becoming available or people's tastes changing. We term this the risk inclusion effect. Second, a risk with lower inherent (reference-independent) utility may be preferred to a risk with higher inherent utility if individuals are more used to accepting the former than the latter. This leads to ineffcient decisions if habituation is seen as contributing less to welfare than inherent utility. Both effects have implications for the optimal regulation of risks.

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File URL: http://sfb649.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/papers/pdf/SFB649DP2005-036.pdf
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany in its series SFB 649 Discussion Papers with number SFB649DP2005-036.

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Length: 28 pages
Date of creation: May 2005
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:hum:wpaper:sfb649dp2005-036

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Related research
Keywords: habituation; risk perception; reference-dependent preferences; WTA/WTP disparity; health risk;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

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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.:
  1. Szymon Borak & Kai Detlefsen & Wolfgang Härdle, 2005. "FFT Based Option Pricing," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-011, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  2. Ralf Brüggemann & Carsten Trenkler, 2005. "Are Eastern European Countries Catching Up? Time Series Evidence for Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-014, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  3. Eun-Kyung Lee & Dianne Cook & Sigbert Klinke & Thomas Lumley, 2005. "Projection Pursuit for Exploratory Supervised Classification," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-026, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  4. Silke Anger, 2005. "Working Time as an Investment?: The Effects of Unpaid Overtime on Wages, Promotions, and Layoffs," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 535, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research. [Downloadable!]
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  5. Sigbert Klinke & Uwe Ziegenhagen & Yuval Guri, 2005. "Yxilon – a Modular Open-Source Statistical Programming Language," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-018, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  6. Enzo Giacomini & Wolfgang Härdle, 2005. "Value-at-Risk Calculations with Time Varying Copulae," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-004, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  7. Oliver Blaskowitz & Helmut Herwartz & Gonzalo de Cadenas Santiago, 2005. "Modeling the FIBOR/EURIBOR Swap Term Structure: An Empirical Approach," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-024, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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  8. Dirk Krueger & Harald Uhlig, 2005. "Competitive Risk Sharing Contracts with One-Sided Commitment," CFS Working Paper Series 2005/07, Center for Financial Studies. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  9. Szymon Borak & Matthias Fengler & Wolfgang Härdle, 2005. "DSFM fitting of Implied Volatility Surfaces," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-022, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  10. Alexander Schied & Ching-Tang Wu, 2005. "Duality theory for optimal investments under model uncertainty," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-025, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, revised Sep 2005. [Downloadable!]
  11. Yasemin Boztug & Lutz Hildebrandt, 2005. "A Market Basket Analysis Conducted with a Multivariate Logit Model," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-028, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  12. Ronald Bachmann, 2005. "Skill mismatch in equilibrium unemployment," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-034, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, revised Aug 2005. [Downloadable!]
  13. Ingolf Dittmann & Christian Weiner, 2005. "Selecting Comparables for the Valuation of European Firms," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-002, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  14. Schabert, Andreas & Stoltenberg, Christian, 2005. "Money Demand and Macroeconomic Stability Revisited," CEPR Discussion Papers 4974, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  15. Szymon Borak & Wolfgang Härdle & Rafal Weron, 2005. "Stable Distributions," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-008, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, 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.)

  1. Markus Fischer & Markus Reiss, 2005. "Discretisation of Stochastic Control Problems for Continuous Time Dynamics with Delay," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-038, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, revised Dec 2005. [Downloadable!]
  2. Anja Schöttner, 2005. "Relational Contracts and Job Design," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-052, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  3. Markus Krätzig, 2005. "A Software Framework for Data Based Analysis," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-044, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  4. Benjamin Bental & Dominique Demougin, 2005. "Do Factor Shares Reflect Technology?," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-050, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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  5. Yasemin Boztug & Lutz Hildebrandt, 2005. "An empirical test of theories of price valuation using a semiparametric approach, reference prices, and accounting for heterogeneity," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-057, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  6. Christian Weiner, 2005. "The Impact of Industry Classification Schemes on Financial Research," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-062, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  7. Wolfgang Härdle & Sigbert Klinke & Uwe Ziegenhagen, 2005. "Integrable e-lements for Statistics Education," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-058, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  8. Imen Bentahar & Bruno Bouchard, 2005. "Explicit characterization of the super-replication strategy in financial markets with partial transaction costs," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-053, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  9. Anja Schöttner, 2005. "Fixed-Prize Tournaments versus First-Price Auctions in Innovation Contests," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-041, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
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