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Estimating Ambiguity Aversion in a Portfolio Choice Experiment

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TLDR
The authors employ graphical representations of three-dimensional budget sets over bundles of Arrow securities, one of which promises a unit payoff with a known probability and two with unknown (ambiguous) probabilities.
Abstract
We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to estimate four prominent models of ambiguity aversion — Subjective Expected Utility (SEU), Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU), Recursive Expected Utility (REU), and α-Maxmin Expected Utility (α-MEU) — at the level of the individual subject. We employ graphical representations of three-dimensional budget sets over bundles of Arrow securities, one of which promises a unit payoff with a known probability and two with unknown (ambiguous) probabilities. The sample exhibits considerable heterogeneity in preferences, as captured through parameter estimates. Nonetheless, there exists a strong tendency to equate the demands for the securities that pay off in the ambiguous states. This feature is more easily accommodated by the α-MEU model than by the REU model.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Consistency and heterogeneity of individual behavior under uncertainty

TL;DR: In this paper, a portfolio choice problem is modeled at the individual level and a two-parameter utility function based on Faruk Gul (1991) is used to characterize the distribution of risk preferences in the population.
Journal ArticleDOI

Risk, Ambiguity, and the Rank-Dependence Axioms

TL;DR: This article showed that rank-dependent preferences over subjective gambles might be subject to the same difficulties that Ellsberg's earlier examples posed for subjective expected utility, and suggest that non-separable models of preferences might be better at capturing features of behavior that lead to these paradoxes.
Journal ArticleDOI

Ambiguous beliefs and mechanism design

TL;DR: A payoff equivalence theorem is developed for mechanisms with ambiguity averse participants with preferences of the Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU) form and it is shown that heightened ambiguity lowers ex ante budget deficits.
Journal ArticleDOI

The distributional preferences of an elite

TL;DR: An important strength of this measure of equality-efficiency tradeoffs between self and other is that it has been shown to predict such tradeoffs in distributional settings involving multiple others and to predict the likelihood of voting for political candidates perceived as favoring greater government redistribution.
Journal ArticleDOI

Revealing Preferences Graphically: An Old Method Gets a New Tool Kit

TL;DR: The standard model of decisions under uncertainty is based on von Neumann and Morgenstern Expected Utility Theory (EUT), so it is natural that experimentalists should want to test the empirical validity of the Savage axioms on which EUT is based.
References
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Book

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit

TL;DR: In Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Knight explored the riddle of profitability in a competitive market profit should not be possible under competitive conditions, as the entry of new entrepreneurs would drive prices down and nullify margins, however evidence abounds of competitive yet profitable markets as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms

TL;DR: The notion of "degrees of belief" was introduced by Knight as mentioned in this paper, who argued that people tend to behave "as though" they assigned numerical probabilities to events, or degrees of belief to the events impinging on their actions.
Journal ArticleDOI

A theory of anticipated utility

TL;DR: In this paper, a cardinal utility theory with an associated set of axioms is presented, which is a generalization of the von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory, which permits the analysis of phenomena associated with the distortion of subjective probability.
Book ChapterDOI

Subjective probability and expected utility without additivity

David Schmeidler
- 01 May 1989 - 
TL;DR: In this paper, an axiom of comonotonic independence is introduced, which weakens the von Neumann-Morgenstern axiom for independence, and the expected utility of an act with respect to the nonadditive probability is computed using the Choquet integral.