Active and Passive Risk-Taking

Arbeitspapier

Risk-taking may depend on whether risks result from an action (active risk-taking) or from not taking action (passive risk-taking). We develop a new experimental risk-elicitation procedure, the Dynamic Lottery Adjustment Task, and employ it across two separate experiments to study the size and direction of potential mode-of-choice effects (i.e. differences in risk-taking between active and passive decision modes). While our tightly controlled lab study provides little evidence for such effects, we find substantial evidence for mode-of-choice effects when decisions are spread out over 10 days and attention costs are a key feature of the online choice environment we use.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Working Papers in Economics and Statistics ; No. 2020-04

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty ; Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡ ; Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual
• Subject: risk-taking ; mode-of-choice ; status quo effect ; omission bias

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): König-Kersting, Christian ; Lohse, Johannes ; Merkel, Anna
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Innsbruck, Research Platform Empirical and Experimental Economics (eeecon)
• (where): Innsbruck
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/238228
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET