{"title":"Unraveling Ambiguity Aversion","authors":"I. Aydogan, L. Berger, V. Bosetti","doi":"10.1162/rest_a_01358","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n We report the results of two experiments designed to better understand the mechanisms driving decision-making under ambiguity. We elicit individual preferences over different sources of uncertainty, entailing different degrees of complexity, from subjects with different sophistication levels. We show that (1) ambiguity aversion is robust to sophistication, but the strong relationship previously reported between attitudes toward ambiguity and compound risk is not. (2) Ellsberg ambiguity attitude can be partly explained by attitudes toward complexity for less sophisticated subjects only. Overall, regardless of the subject's sophistication level, the main driver of Ellsberg ambiguity attitude is a specific treatment of unknown probabilities.","PeriodicalId":48456,"journal":{"name":"Review of Economics and Statistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Review of Economics and Statistics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01358","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
We report the results of two experiments designed to better understand the mechanisms driving decision-making under ambiguity. We elicit individual preferences over different sources of uncertainty, entailing different degrees of complexity, from subjects with different sophistication levels. We show that (1) ambiguity aversion is robust to sophistication, but the strong relationship previously reported between attitudes toward ambiguity and compound risk is not. (2) Ellsberg ambiguity attitude can be partly explained by attitudes toward complexity for less sophisticated subjects only. Overall, regardless of the subject's sophistication level, the main driver of Ellsberg ambiguity attitude is a specific treatment of unknown probabilities.
期刊介绍:
The Review of Economics and Statistics is a 100-year-old general journal of applied (especially quantitative) economics. Edited at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Review has published some of the most important articles in empirical economics.