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 preference for strategic uncertainty using neuroimaging when subjects play sequentially a combination of matching pennies and coordination games without feedback. The scanned subject has the option to ‘play’, in which case both receive outcomes according to their moves, or...

Keynes (1921) and Ellsberg (1961) have articulated an aversion toward betting on an urn containing balls of two colors of unknown proportion to one with a 50-50 composition. Keynes views this as reflecting different preferences for bets arising from different sources of uncertainty. Ellsberg...

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...