IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v228y2024ics0167268124003925.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ambiguity attitudes and surprises: Experimental evidence on communicating new information within a large population sample

Author

Listed:
  • Minnich, Aljoscha
  • Roggenkamp, Hauke
  • Lange, Andreas

Abstract

This paper investigates ambiguity attitudes for natural events (temperatures) and how they are updated following new information. Using a general population sample, we first obtain baseline ambiguity attitudes for future weather events based on real temperatures over several past days. Second, we study the influence of different communication types on updating the ambiguity attitudes: participants are given either point estimators, interval estimators, or the combination of both as weather forecasts. We further vary whether the forecast is surprising or in line with the initially received information. In contrast to claims that ambiguity aversion may increase in response to surprising news, we find that ambiguity attitudes are rather robust to new information and variants of their communication. Yet, different variants of communicating new information significantly change the belief updating process and affect the matching probabilities given to specific events. Our sample allows us to analyze socio-demographic correlates of ambiguity attitudes and the updating of ambiguity attitudes to new information.

Suggested Citation

  • Minnich, Aljoscha & Roggenkamp, Hauke & Lange, Andreas, 2024. "Ambiguity attitudes and surprises: Experimental evidence on communicating new information within a large population sample," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 228(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:228:y:2024:i:c:s0167268124003925
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106778
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268124003925
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106778?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gilboa Itzhak & Schmeidler David, 1993. "Updating Ambiguous Beliefs," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 33-49, February.
    2. Dominiak, Adam & Duersch, Peter & Lefort, Jean-Philippe, 2012. "A dynamic Ellsberg urn experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 75(2), pages 625-638.
    3. repec:dau:papers:123456789/7333 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Thomas Dohmen & Armin Falk & David Huffman & Uwe Sunde & Jürgen Schupp & Gert G. Wagner, 2011. "Individual Risk Attitudes: Measurement, Determinants, And Behavioral Consequences," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 522-550, June.
    5. Cohen, M. & Gilboa, I. & Jaffray, J.Y. & Schmeidler, D., 2000. "An experimental study of updating ambiguous beliefs," Risk, Decision and Policy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(2), pages 123-133, June.
    6. Dmitri Vinogradov & Yousef Makhlouf, 2021. "Signaling probabilities in ambiguity: who reacts to vague news?," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 90(3), pages 371-404, May.
    7. Chateauneuf, Alain & Eichberger, Jurgen & Grant, Simon, 2007. "Choice under uncertainty with the best and worst in mind: Neo-additive capacities," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 137(1), pages 538-567, November.
    8. Georgalos, Konstantinos, 2021. "Dynamic decision making under ambiguity: An experimental investigation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 28-46.
    9. De Filippis, Roberta & Guarino, Antonio & Jehiel, Philippe & Kitagawa, Toru, 2022. "Non-Bayesian updating in a social learning experiment," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 199(C).
    10. Klibanoff, Peter & Marinacci, Massimo & Mukerji, Sujoy, 2009. "Recursive smooth ambiguity preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 930-976, May.
    11. , & ,, 2007. "Updating preferences with multiple priors," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 2(3), September.
    12. Paolo Ghirardato & Massimo Marinacci, 2001. "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Separation of Utility and Beliefs," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 26(4), pages 864-890, November.
    13. Hans-Martin von Gaudecker & Axel Wogrolly & Christian Zimpelmann, 2021. "The Distribution of Ambiguity Attitudes," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2021_272, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    14. Zeileis, Achim, 2004. "Econometric Computing with HC and HAC Covariance Matrix Estimators," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 11(i10).
    15. Alexander Peysakhovich & Uma R. Karmarkar, 2016. "Asymmetric Effects of Favorable and Unfavorable Information on Decision Making Under Ambiguity," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(8), pages 2163-2178, August.
    16. Chen Li & Uyanga Turmunkh & Peter P. Wakker, 2019. "Trust as a decision under ambiguity," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 22(1), pages 51-75, March.
    17. repec:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2022_272v2 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Peijnenburg, Kim & Anantanasuwong, Kanin & Kouwenberg, Roy & Mitchell, Olivia S, 2019. "Ambiguity Attitudes about Investments: Evidence from the Field," CEPR Discussion Papers 13518, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    19. David Budescu & Han-Hui Por & Stephen Broomell, 2012. "Effective communication of uncertainty in the IPCC reports," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 113(2), pages 181-200, July.
    20. Masahide Watanabe & Toshio Fujimi, 2024. "Ambiguity attitudes toward natural and artificial sources in gain and loss domains," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 68(1), pages 51-75, February.
    21. Charles F. Manski, 2019. "Communicating uncertainty in policy analysis," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116(16), pages 7634-7641, April.
    22. Baillon, Aurélien & Bleichrodt, Han & Li, Chen & Wakker, Peter P., 2021. "Belief hedges: Measuring ambiguity for all events and all models," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    23. Branden B. Johnson, 2003. "Further Notes on Public Response to Uncertainty in Risks and Science," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 23(4), pages 781-789, August.
    24. Lauren C. Howe & Bo MacInnis & Jon A. Krosnick & Ezra M. Markowitz & Robert Socolow, 2019. "Acknowledging uncertainty impacts public acceptance of climate scientists’ predictions," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 9(11), pages 863-867, November.
    25. Olivier l’Haridon & Ferdinand M. Vieider & Diego Aycinena & Agustinus Bandur & Alexis Belianin & Lubomír Cingl & Amit Kothiyal & Peter Martinsson, 2018. "Off the Charts: Massive Unexplained Heterogeneity in a Global Study of Ambiguity Attitudes," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 100(4), pages 664-677, October.
    26. Aurélien Baillon & Han Bleichrodt & Umut Keskin & Olivier l’Haridon & Chen Li, 2018. "The Effect of Learning on Ambiguity Attitudes," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(5), pages 2181-2198, May.
    27. Sandeep Baliga & Eran Hanany & Peter Klibanoff, 2013. "Polarization and Ambiguity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(7), pages 3071-3083, December.
    28. Gary Charness & Ryan Oprea & Sevgi Yuksel, 2021. "How do People Choose Between Biased Information Sources? Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 19(3), pages 1656-1691.
    29. Su, Siyan, 2022. "Updating politicized beliefs: How motivated reasoning contributes to polarization," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    30. Aurélien Baillon & Zhenxing Huang & Asli Selim & Peter P. Wakker, 2018. "Measuring Ambiguity Attitudes for All (Natural) Events," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 86(5), pages 1839-1858, September.
    31. Bock, Olaf & Baetge, Ingmar & Nicklisch, Andreas, 2014. "hroot: Hamburg Registration and Organization Online Tool," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 117-120.
    32. Charles F. Manski, 2015. "Communicating Uncertainty in Official Economic Statistics: An Appraisal Fifty Years after Morgenstern," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 53(3), pages 631-653, September.
    33. Ghirardato, Paolo & Maccheroni, Fabio & Marinacci, Massimo, 2004. "Differentiating ambiguity and ambiguity attitude," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 118(2), pages 133-173, October.
    34. Branden B. Johnson & Paul Slovic, 1995. "Presenting Uncertainty in Health Risk Assessment: Initial Studies of Its Effects on Risk Perception and Trust," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 15(4), pages 485-494, August.
    35. Stephen G. Dimmock & Roy Kouwenberg & Peter P. Wakker, 2016. "Ambiguity Attitudes in a Large Representative Sample," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(5), pages 1363-1380, May.
    36. Zhao, Chen, 2022. "Pseudo-Bayesian updating," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 17(1), January.
    37. Zarnowitz, Victor & Lambros, Louis A, 1987. "Consensus and Uncertainty in Economic Prediction," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(3), pages 591-621, June.
    38. Emily H. Ho & David V. Budescu, 2019. "Climate uncertainty communication," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 9(11), pages 802-803, November.
    39. Lybbert, Travis J. & Barrett, Christopher B. & McPeak, John G. & Luseno, Winnie K., 2007. "Bayesian Herders: Updating of Rainfall Beliefs in Response to External Forecasts," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 480-497, March.
    40. Li, Jian, 2020. "Preferences for partial information and ambiguity," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 15(3), July.
    41. Divya Aggarwal & Pitabas Mohanty, 2022. "Influence of imprecise information on risk and ambiguity preferences: Experimental evidence," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(4), pages 1025-1038, June.
    42. repec:dau:papers:123456789/7357 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aljoscha Minnich & Andreas Lange, 2025. "Ambiguity attitudes of individuals and groups in gain and loss domains," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 98(3), pages 373-403, May.

    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. Aljoscha Minnich & Hauke Roggenkamp & Andreas Lange, 2023. "Ambiguity Attitudes and Surprises: Experimental Evidence on Communicating New Information within a Large Population Sample," CESifo Working Paper Series 10783, CESifo.
    2. Henkel, Luca, 2024. "Experimental evidence on the relationship between perceived ambiguity and likelihood insensitivity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 312-338.
    3. Kanin Anantanasuwong & Roy Kouwenberg & Olivia S. Mitchell & Kim Peijnenburg, 2024. "Ambiguity attitudes for real-world sources: field evidence from a large sample of investors," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 27(3), pages 548-581, July.
    4. Konstantinos Georgalos, 2019. "An experimental test of the predictive power of dynamic ambiguity models," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 59(1), pages 51-83, August.
    5. Aurélien Baillon & Han Bleichrodt & Umut Keskin & Olivier l’Haridon & Chen Li, 2018. "The Effect of Learning on Ambiguity Attitudes," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(5), pages 2181-2198, May.
    6. Georgalos, Konstantinos, 2021. "Dynamic decision making under ambiguity: An experimental investigation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 28-46.
    7. Kathleen Ngangoué, M., 2021. "Learning under ambiguity: An experiment in gradual information processing," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).
    8. Aurélien Baillon & Han Bleichrodt & Umut Keskin & Olivier L'Haridon & Author-Name: Chen Li, 2013. "Learning under ambiguity: An experiment using initial public offerings on a stock market," Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes & University of Caen) 201331, Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes, University of Caen and CNRS.
    9. Aljoscha Minnich & Andreas Lange, 2025. "Ambiguity attitudes of individuals and groups in gain and loss domains," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 98(3), pages 373-403, May.
    10. Ellis, Andrew, 2018. "On dynamic consistency in ambiguous games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 241-249.
    11. Spyros Galanis, 2021. "Dynamic consistency, valuable information and subjective beliefs," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 71(4), pages 1467-1497, June.
    12. Cheng, Xiaoyu, 2022. "Relative Maximum Likelihood updating of ambiguous beliefs," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    13. Elchin Suleymanov, 2025. "Robust Maximum Likelihood Updating," Papers 2504.17151, arXiv.org.
    14. Li, Chen & Turmunkh, Uyanga & Wakker, Peter P., 2020. "Social and strategic ambiguity versus betrayal aversion," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 272-287.
    15. Yu Gao & Zhenxing Huang & Ning Liu & Jia Yang, 2024. "Are physicians rational under ambiguity?," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 68(2), pages 183-203, April.
    16. Dmitri Vinogradov & Yousef Makhlouf, 2021. "Signaling probabilities in ambiguity: who reacts to vague news?," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 90(3), pages 371-404, May.
    17. Aljoscha Minnich & Andreas Lange, 2023. "Ambiguity Attitudes of Individuals and Groups in Gain and Loss Domains," CESifo Working Paper Series 10781, CESifo.
    18. Baillon, Aurélien & Bleichrodt, Han & Li, Chen & Wakker, Peter P., 2021. "Belief hedges: Measuring ambiguity for all events and all models," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    19. Gianna Lotito & Anna Maffioletti & Michele Santoni, 2024. "Testing source influence on ambiguity reaction: Preference and insensitivity," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 69(3), pages 349-411, December.
    20. Heyen, Daniel, 2018. "Ambiguity aversion under maximum-likelihood updating," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 80342, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ambiguity attitude; Belief updating; Expert forecasts; Survey experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments

    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:eee:jeborg:v:228:y:2024:i:c:s0167268124003925. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jebo .

    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.