Follow Your Heart but Listen to Your Brain! Emotions, Knowledge, and Preference for Uncertainty

We investigate the joint relationships between preference for uncertainty, emotion, and knowledge, which have mostly been investigated separately in Economics and Psychology until now. We analyze the joint association of emotions, and knowledge in decision-making under uncertainty, in a TV game show setting. We examine the preference for the uncertainty of 59 contestants in the TV game show “JOKER”. We find that preference for uncertainty increases when the contents have a full domain or total absence of knowledge. Our results point also out that emotions are the factor that only determines the preference for uncertainty when contestants have a restricted level of knowledge