Probabilities vs Money: A Test of Some Fundamental Assumptions about Rational Decision Making

This paper describes an experiment where respondents were asked to tackle two decision tasks which were very similar in structure but which differed in that one problem involved direct money payoffs while the other involved payoffs in the form of probabilities of winning a given sum of money. According to most decision models, most risk averse individuals might be expected to behave quite differently under the two conditions. But the behavior actually observed does not accord with this expectation. The paper discusses possible reasons for this and the potential implications of such findings.