We explore how risk-taking in the card game contract bridge, and in a financial gamble, correlate with variation in the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4) among serious tournament bridge players. In bridge risk-taking, we find significant interactions between genetic predisposition and skill....

Background: Economic risk taking is different from social risk taking. In experimental economics, the former is typically measured through an individual’s willingness to trade off variance for expected value, whereas the latter is typically measured by the trust game (TG) where one individual...

While there has been a recent increase in focus on the role of early life socioeconomic status (SES) on preferences and decision-making, there is still debate surrounding the proper theoretical framework for understanding such effects. Some have argued that early life SES can fundamentally shift...

The most widely used economic models of social preferences are specified only for certain outcomes. There are two obvious methods of extending them to lotteries. If we do so by expected utility theory, so that the independence axiom is satisfied, our results imply that the resulting preferences...

We derive a simplified version of the model of Fudenberg and Levine [2006, 2011] and show how this approximate model is useful in explaining choice under risk. We show that in the simple case of three outcomes, the model can generate indifference curves that “fan out” in the Marshack-Machina...