Gender specific attitudes towards risk and ambiguity: An experimental investigation

Arbeitspapier

On the one hand, empirical evidence shows that in financial markets women seem to behave more risk averse than men. On the other hand there is experimental showing that in risky decisions controlled for opportunity sets only the context matters. In investment and insurance contexts with given probabilities women seem to expose approximately the same risk aversion as men. However, in real-life decisions the probability information is rather ambiguous. Therefore also the framing of information may be important. We conducted a lottery experiment introducing three types of probability information: pure risk, weak ambiguity and strong ambiguity. Our main result is that gender differences may arise in ambiguity frames: women are more ambiguity averse than men in the investment context, but not in the insurance context.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Economics Working Paper Series ; No. 00/17

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Schubert, Renate ; Gysler, Matthias ; Brown, Martin ; Brachinger, Hans-Wolfgang
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): ETH Zurich, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research
• (where): Zurich
• (when): 2000

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/171462
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET