Measuring Individual Risk Attitudes in the Lab: Task or Ask? An Empirical Comparison
By Jan-Erik Lönnqvist, M. Verkasalo, Gari Walkowitz, Philipp C. Wichardt. Social Science Research Network, 2015
320 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper reports on an empirical comparison of two prominent measures of individual risk attitudes – the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen et al. (2011) – with respect to their within-subject stability over time (one year) and their correlation with actual risk-taking behavior in the lab – here the amount sent in a trust game (Berg et al., 1995). Our results suggest that the two risk attitude measures are at best only weakly correlated. Only the questionnaire measure shows high test–retest stability, while virtually no such stability is found in the lottery-choice task. In addition, only the questionnaire measure shows the expected correlations with a Big Five personality measure and is correlated with actual risk-taking behavior. With respect to behavior in the trust game, we find a high retest stability of transfers. This supports the conjecture that trusting behavior has a component which itself is a stable individual characteristic.
Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18beee2f798badc47cc238133f528056065f5e7b
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Citations in the corpus
- Trust: An Integrative Review from a Person–Situation Perspective (2015, background): “Given that (at least some of) these measures are only weakly related to each other (e.g., BenNer & Halldorsson, 2010; Eckel & Wilson, 2004; Lönnqvist et al., 2010), it is questionable whether they actually measure the same construct (i.”
- The psychometric and empirical properties of measures of risk preferences (2017, unknown): “The research that does address or touch upon these questions suggests the measures are subject to significant measurement error (Barsky et al. 1997; Gillen et al. 2015; Harrison et al. 2005; Sahm 2012; Kimball et al. 2008; Lönnqvist et al. 2014) and have only limited predictive validity.”
- Experimentally Validated Survey Evidence on Individual Risk Attitudes in Rural Thailand (2013, methodology): “Lönnqvist et al. (2010) compare the same 232 students’ risk attitude elicited via self-assessment and via an incentivized laboratory experiment.”
- Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices (2012, unknown): “Lonnqvist et al. (2010) find the question to be much more stable over time than lottery measures for risk attitudes.”