ON THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF TIME AND RISK PREFERENCES: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

"When explaining risk taking, intertemporal allocation, and distributing behavior, economists rely on risk, time, and other-regarding preferences but offer no guidance on how these three crucial aspects are interrelated. We report on an experiment exploring such interrelation. For this sake, we compare evaluations of several prospects, each of which allocates certain or risky and immediate or delayed payoffs to the actor and to another participant. We find that individuals are self-oriented as to social allocation of risk and delay and other-regarding with respect to expected payoffs". ("JEL" C91, D63, D81) Copyright (c) 2007 Western Economic Association International.