We study the role of risk aversion underlying son preference in patriarchal societies, where sons serve as better insurance for old-age support than daughters. The implications of an insurance motive on son preference are two-fold. First, prior to the birth of their children, more risk-averse...

We study the role of risk aversion underlying son preference in patriarchal societies, where sons serve as better insurance for old-age support than daughters. The implications of an insurance motive on son preference are two-fold. First, prior to the birth of their children, more risk-averse...

This paper investigates attitude towards partial ambiguity. In a laboratory setting, we study three symmetric variants of the ambiguous urn in Ellsberg's 2-urn paradox by varying the possible compositions of red and black cards in a 100-card deck. Subjects value betting on a deck with a smaller...

We extend Ellsberg's two-urn paradox and propose three symmetric forms of partial ambiguity by limiting the possible compositions in a deck of 100 red and black cards in three ways. Interval ambiguity involves a symmetric range of 50-n to 50 n red cards. Complementarily, disjoint ambiguity...

It is increasingly recognized that decision making under uncertainty does not depend only on probabilities, but also on psychological factors. People display ambiguity aversion in preferring to bet on events with known probabilities rather than those for which probabilities are not known. People...

Purpose – This experimental economics study using brain imaging techniques investigates the risk-ambiguity distinction in relation to the source preference hypothesis (Fox & Tversky, 1995) in which identically distributed risks arising from different sources of uncertainty may engender...

We propose a nonparametric revealed preference test to identify heterogeneity in risk preference. Our method is simple and applicable to choice environments with revealed preference features. We further develop two measures of preference heterogeneity at both the individual and group levels, and...