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Do the Wealthy Risk More Money? An Experimental Comparison

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Author Info
Antoni Bosch-Domènech ()
Joaquim Silvestre

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Abstract

Are poor people more or less likely to take money risks than wealthy folks? We find that risk attraction is more prevalent among the wealthy when the amounts of money at risk are small (not surprising, since ten dollars is a smaller amount for a wealthy person than for a poor one), but, interestingly, for the larger amounts of money at risk the fraction of the nonwealthy displaying risk attraction exceeds that of the wealthy. We also replicate our previous finding that many people display risk attraction for small money amounts, but risk aversion for large ones. We argue that preferences yielding “risk attraction for small money amounts, together with risk aversion for larger amounts, at all levels of wealth,” while contradicting the expected utility hypothesis, may be well-defined, independently of reference points, on the choice space.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in its series Economics Working Papers with number 692.

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Date of creation: Jun 2003
Date of revision: Jan 2005
Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:692

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Related research
Keywords: Risk attraction; risk aversion; wealth; experiments; Leex;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

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