Social comparison and risky choices

By Jona Linde, Joep Sonnemans. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 2009

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theories (and experiments) on decision making under risk typically ignore (and exclude) a social context. We explore whether this omission is detrimental. To do so we experimentally investigate the simplest possible situation with both social comparison and risk: participants choose between two lotteries while a referent faces a fixed payoff. Participants are more risk averse when they can earn at most as much as their referent (loss situation) than when they are ensured they will earn at least as much as their referent (gain situation). Prospect theory with a social reference point would predict the exact opposite behavior. These results show that straightforward extensions of existing theories to allow for social comparison do not provide accurate predictions.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc8adb12bd5ddaa350d5dd947165b4b21f5bbd44

How researchers see this paper

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In General Decision Sciences

1. Ferdinand M. Vieider
2. Stefan T. Trautmann
3. Michal Krawczyk
4. Fabrice Le Lec

Citations in the corpus

• Social influences on risk attitudes: Applications in economics (2012, background): “Linde and Sonnemans (2009) and Rohde and Rohde (2009) provide theoretical models and empirical tests of this paradigm.”