【主讲】Jaimie W. Lien (Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University)
【主题】Where You Stand Affects the Risks You Take: Socially Reference-Dependent Risk Attitudes
【时间】2014年12月19日 (周五) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼710室
【语言】英文
【摘要】How does an individual’s position within a social distribution influence their desire to take risk? Reference-dependent loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Koszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) adapted to a social setting, suggests that individuals may find risk more appealing when they are doing especially well or poorly compared to their peers. We examine the effects of social position on risk attitudes in a simple experiment which allows subjects to take risks at different locations in the social distribution against a backdrop of real effort tasks. Subjects’ reference point under the loss aversion assumption is inferred from their empirical risk-taking patterns. Among low opportunity (expected earnings) subjects, we find a convex relationship in risk-taking across the social distribution when social information is available, consistent with a reference-point near the social median. For high opportunity (expected earnings) subjects, risk taking tends to be concave in social position, consistent with having a reference-point near the top of the social distribution. These patterns are not present in the control groups where no social information is provided to subjects. We find supporting evidence for our experimental results using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY 97), in which similar patterns of risk tendencies across the income distribution are reported among college and non-college educated respondents in the US.
