A menu of paired lottery choices is structured so that the crossover point to the high-risk lottery can be used to infer the degree of risk aversion. With normal laboratory payoffs of several dollars, most subjects are risk averse and few are risk loving. Scaling up all payoffs by factors of...

Hypothetical referenda have been proposed as an incentive- compatible mechanism that can be used to obtain social valuations of environmental resources. We employ experimental methods to test the hypothesis that such referenda are indeed incentive compatible. Our results lead us to reject that...