Classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to counteract excessive risk aversion in agents. In a setting where any kind of risk taking is suboptimal for shareholders, we show that excessive risk taking may occur for one of two reasons: risk...

Die Bundesregierung hat beschlossen, den Primärenergiebedarf von Gebäuden bis 2050 um 80 % zu senken. Dazu muss die energetische Sanierungsrate von derzeit 0,8 % auf 2,0 % pro Jahr gesteigert werden. Um festzustellen, wie durch neue und bestehende Politikinstrumente diese Steigerung der...

We explore situations in which a decision-maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own. For gains we confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion, while in the loss domain we find increased risk seeking. In a...

Risk attitudes are known to be sensitive to large stake variations. However, little is known on the sensitivity to moderate variations in stakes. This is important for studies that want to compare risk attitudes between countries or over time. I find that variations of ±20% affect only utility,...

The ratio bias – according to which individuals prefer to bet on probabilities expressed as a ratio of large numbers to normatively equivalent or superior probabilities expressed as a ratio of small numbers – has recently gained momentum, with researchers especially in health economics...

Most studies on the role of incentives on risk attitude report data obtained from within-subject experimental investigations. This may however raise an issue of sequentiality of effects as later choices may be influenced by earlier ones. This paper reports instead between-subject results on the...

In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability—the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else—is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...

This paper finds preference reversals in measurements of ambiguity aversion, even if psychological and informational circumstances are kept constant. The reversals are of a fundamentally different nature than the reversals found before because they cannot be explained by context-dependent...

We let subjects take risky decisions that affect themselves and a passive recipient. Adding a requirement to justify their choices significantly reduces loss aversion. This indicates that such an accountability mechanism may be effective at debiasing loss aversion in agency relations.

Classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to induce risk neutrality in otherwise risk averse agents. In an experiment, we find that subjects acting as executives do also take risks that are excessive from the perspective of shareholders if...