IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/28531.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Ellsberg Paradox and Second-order Preference Theories on Ambiguity: Some New Experimental Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Yang, Chun-Lei
  • Yao, Lan

Abstract

We study the two-color problem by Ellsberg (1961) with the modification that the decision maker draws twice with replacement and a different color wins in each draw. The 50-50 risky urn turns out to have the highest risk conceivable among all prospects including the ambiguous one, while all feasible color distributions are mean-preserving spreads to one another. We show that the well-known second-order sophisticated theories like MEU, CEU, and REU as well as Savage’s first-order theory of SEU share the same predictions in our design, for any first-order risk attitude. Yet, we observe that substantial numbers of subjects violate the theory predictions even in this simple design.

Suggested Citation

  • Yang, Chun-Lei & Yao, Lan, 2011. "Ellsberg Paradox and Second-order Preference Theories on Ambiguity: Some New Experimental Evidence," MPRA Paper 28531, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:28531
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/28531/1/MPRA_paper_28531.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yoram Halevy & Vincent Feltkamp, 2005. "A Bayesian Approach to Uncertainty Aversion," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 72(2), pages 449-466.
    2. Segal, Uzi, 1990. "Two-Stage Lotteries without the Reduction Axiom," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 58(2), pages 349-377, March.
    3. Segal, Uzi, 1987. "The Ellsberg Paradox and Risk Aversion: An Anticipated Utility Approach," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 28(1), pages 175-202, February.
    4. Craig R. Fox & Amos Tversky, 1995. "Ambiguity Aversion and Comparative Ignorance," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(3), pages 585-603.
    5. Robert F. Nau, 2006. "Uncertainty Aversion with Second-Order Utilities and Probabilities," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(1), pages 136-145, January.
    6. Charles A. Holt & Susan K. Laury, 2002. "Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1644-1655, December.
    7. Casadesus-Masanell, Ramon & Klibanoff, Peter & Ozdenoren, Emre, 2000. "Maxmin Expected Utility over Savage Acts with a Set of Priors," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 92(1), pages 35-65, May.
    8. Gilboa, Itzhak & Schmeidler, David, 1989. "Maxmin expected utility with non-unique prior," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 141-153, April.
    9. Camerer, Colin & Weber, Martin, 1992. "Recent Developments in Modeling Preferences: Uncertainty and Ambiguity," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 5(4), pages 325-370, October.
    10. Kyoungwon Seo, 2009. "Ambiguity and Second-Order Belief," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 77(5), pages 1575-1605, September.
    11. Daniel Ellsberg, 1961. "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 75(4), pages 643-669.
    12. Ergin, Haluk & Gul, Faruk, 2009. "A theory of subjective compound lotteries," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 899-929, May.
    13. Peter Klibanoff & Massimo Marinacci & Sujoy Mukerji, 2005. "A Smooth Model of Decision Making under Ambiguity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 73(6), pages 1849-1892, November.
    14. Ramon Casadesus-Masanell & Peter Klibanoff & Emre Ozdenoren, 1998. "Maximum Expected Utility over Savage Acts with a Set of Priors," Discussion Papers 1218, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    15. Jack Stecher & Timothy Shields & John Dickhaut (deceased), 2011. "Generating Ambiguity in the Laboratory," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 57(4), pages 705-712, April.
    16. Yoram Halevy, 2007. "Ellsberg Revisited: An Experimental Study," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(2), pages 503-536, March.
    17. Schmeidler, David, 1989. "Subjective Probability and Expected Utility without Additivity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 57(3), pages 571-587, May.
    18. Heath, Chip & Tversky, Amos, 1991. "Preference and Belief: Ambiguity and Competence in Choice under Uncertainty," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 4(1), pages 5-28, January.
    19. Clare Chua Chow & Rakesh Sarin, 2002. "Known, Unknown, and Unknowable Uncertainties," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 52(2), pages 127-138, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Craig S. Webb, 2017. "Purely subjective variational preferences," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 64(1), pages 121-137, June.
    2. Ilke Aydogan & Lo?c Berger & Valentina Bosetti & Ning Liu, 2018. "Three Layers of Uncertainty: an Experiment," Working Papers 2018.24, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    3. Prokosheva, Sasha, 2016. "Comparing decisions under compound risk and ambiguity: The importance of cognitive skills," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 94-105.
    4. Yoram Halevy & Emre Ozdenoren, 2022. "Uncertainty and compound lotteries: calibration," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 74(2), pages 373-395, September.
    5. repec:hal:journl:hal-03031751 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Ilke AYDOGAN & Loïc BERGER & Valentina BOSETTI & Ning LIU, 2022. "Three layers of uncertainty," Working Papers 2022-iRisk-01, IESEG School of Management.
    7. David Ahn & Syngjoo Choi & Douglas Gale & Shachar Kariv, 2014. "Estimating ambiguity aversion in a portfolio choice experiment," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 5, pages 195-223, July.
    8. Ilke Aydogan & Loïc Berger & Valentina Bosetti & Ning Liu, 2022. "Three layers of uncertainty," Working Papers hal-03031751, HAL.
    9. Loic Berger & Valentina Bosetti, 2016. "Ellsberg Re-revisited: An Experiment Disentangling Model Uncertainty and Risk Aversion," Working Papers 2016.37, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    10. Johanna Etner & Meglena Jeleva & Jean‐Marc Tallon, 2012. "Decision Theory Under Ambiguity," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(2), pages 234-270, April.
    11. Filiz-Ozbay, Emel & Gulen, Huseyin & Masatlioglu, Yusufcan & Ozbay, Erkut Y., 2022. "Comparing ambiguous urns with different sizes," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 199(C).
    12. Karni, Edi & Maccheroni, Fabio & Marinacci, Massimo, 2015. "Ambiguity and Nonexpected Utility," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,, Elsevier.
    13. Christoph Bühren & Fabian Meier & Marco Pleßner, 2023. "Ambiguity aversion: bibliometric analysis and literature review of the last 60 years," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 73(2), pages 495-525, June.
    14. Evren, Özgür, 2019. "Recursive non-expected utility: Connecting ambiguity attitudes to risk preferences and the level of ambiguity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 285-307.
    15. Sasha Prokosheva, 2014. "Comparing Decisions under Compound Risk and Ambiguity: The Importance of Cognitive Skills," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp525, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    16. repec:hal:wpaper:hal-04071242 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Dean, Mark & Ortoleva, Pietro, 2017. "Allais, Ellsberg, and preferences for hedging," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 12(1), January.
    18. Ilke Aydogan & Loïc Berger & Valentina Bosetti, 2023. "Unraveling Ambiguity Aversion," Post-Print hal-04071242, HAL.
    19. Han Bleichrodt & Jurgen Eichberger & Simon Grant & David Kelsey & Chen Li, 2018. "A Test of Dynamic Consistency and Consequentialism in the Presence of Ambiguity," Discussion Papers 1803, University of Exeter, Department of Economics.
    20. König-Kersting, Christian & Kops, Christopher & Trautmann, Stefan T., 2023. "A test of (weak) certainty independence," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 209(C).
    21. Ahsanuzzaman, & Priyo, Asad Karim Khan & Nuzhat, Kanti Ananta, 2022. "Effects of communication, group selection, and social learning on risk and ambiguity attitudes: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    22. Ilke AYDOGAN & Loïc BERGER & Valentina BOSETTI, 2023. "Unraveling Ambiguity Aversion," Working Papers 2023-iRisk-01, IESEG School of Management.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ellsberg paradox; Ambiguity; Second-order risk; Second-order preference theory; Experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:28531. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.