Does boredom affect economic risk preferences?

Abstract

Previous literature and conventional wisdom have led researchers to believe that boredom increases economic risk taking, but the evidence in support of this conclusion is limited and has important shortcomings. In four experiments (including more than 1,300 subjects), we systematically studied the effects of boredom on economic risk preferences. Across different risk elicitation tasks, boredom inductions, incentive schemes, subject pools, and using both reduced form and structural analyses, we consistently failed to find an effect of boredom on risky decisions. Our results disprove that boredom leads to even small increments in risk taking in one-shot elicitation tasks, and small to medium increases in multiple-choice elicitations. These findings question an important established belief, contribute to better understand the consequences of boredom, and have substantive implications for experiments on economic decision making.