We investigate whether the set of Kreps and Porteus (1978) preferences include classes of preferences that are stationary, monotonic and well-ordered in terms of risk aversion. We prove that the class of preferences introduced by Hansen and Sargent (1995) in their robustness analysis is the only...

Loss aversion has been shown to be an important driver of people’s investment decisions. Encouraged by regulators, financial institutions are in search of ways to incorporate clients’ loss aversion in their risk classifications. The most critical obstacle appears to be the lack of a valid...

We measure individual-level loss aversion using three incentivized, representative surveys of the U.S. population (combined N=3,000). We find that around 50% of the U.S. population is loss tolerant, with many participants accepting negative-expected-value gambles. This is counter to earlier...

Humans are often characterized as Bayesian reasoners. Here, we question the core Bayesian assumption that probabilities reflect degrees of belief. Across 10 studies, we find that people instead reason in a digital manner, assuming that uncertain information is either true or false when using...

Overwhelming evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that, in simple discrimination tasks (determining what is louder, longer, brighter, or even which number is larger) humans make more mistakes and decide more slowly when the stimuli are closer along the relevant scale. We investigate to...

Many economically important settings, from financial markets to consumer choice, involve dynamic decisions under risk. People are willing to accept risk as part of a sequence of choices---even when it is fair or has a negative expected value---while at the same time rejecting positive-expected...

We provide the first behavioral characterization of nested logit, a foundational and widely applied model in discrete choice. We take a revealed preference approach to identify the underlying notion of similarity and use it to characterize a non-parametric version of nested logit we call Nested...

We design a laboratory experiment to test for behavioral differences due to observation within a novel arena: investment games. We find that fund managers are more risk-averse when investors can observe their investment allocations. This effect is more pronounced when investors, in addition to...

We introduce DOSE--Dynamically Optimized Sequential Experimentation--to elicit preference parameters. DOSE starts with a model of preferences and a prior over the parameters of that model, then dynamically chooses a customized question sequence for each participant according to an...

We consider risk sharing among individuals in a one-period setting under uncertainty, that will result in payoffs to be shared among the members. We start with optimal risk sharing in an Arrow-Debreu economy, or equivalently, in a Borch-style reinsurance market. From the results of this model we...