Description du projet
Chercher ou éviter les risques: le cas des préférences biaisées
Les risques orientés vers la gauche se caractérisent par une faible probabilité de subir des pertes importantes, tandis que, par opposition, les risques orientés vers la droite se caractérisent par une faible probabilité d’obtenir des gains importants. Le projet SkewPref, financé par l’UE, apportera un éclairage sur les préférences des humains en matière de risques rares à impact élevé et démontrera comment elles influencent bien plus le comportement qu’on ne l’avait pensé. Ce faisant, le projet illustrera leur rôle important dans l’analyse économique du risque et aidera à révéler les raisons inhérentes à la prise d’un risque élevé pour un faible gain ou au paradoxe de la sous-pondération et de la surpondération, entre autres.
Objectif
“Penny-picking in front of a steamroller” describes the behavior of repeatedly taking risks with an unlikely but extreme downside in order to secure a small but likely benefit. Examples of penny-picking include risking one’s life by driving too fast or blowing up financial bubbles by speculating that they will not burst just yet. Penny-picking suggests that people underweight rare, high-impact events when making their decisions. On the other hand, individuals overpay for lottery gambles and insurances alike, suggesting just the opposite—that people overweight rare, high-impact events.
The goal of this project is to provide a fundamental understanding of humans’ skewness preferences—our attitudes toward rare, high-impact risks. I show that skewness preferences are much more influential on behavior than previously realized and thus must take a central place in the economic analysis of risk. The reason is that skewness preferences have unexpected and far-reaching implications in dynamic decision situations, and I will study their complex interaction with time.
I pursue this research agenda in three steps. First, I focus on static, one-time decision situations and define skewness preferences formally. I show that the leading economic theories—often implicitly—assign first-order importance to skewness preferences and that this observation explains much of these theories’ success. Second, I study skewness preferences in dynamic settings and analyze their complex interaction with time preferences. I propose a new model that identifies the role of skewness for repeated risk-taking. Third, I test my theoretical contributions through experiments on rare, high-impact risks in static and repeated decision situations, using a relatively novel experimental technique to implement rare, high-impact events. Out of the theoretical explanations established, I seek to identify the fundamental reasons behind phenomena such as penny-picking or the underweighting-overweighting paradox.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
69117 Heidelberg
Allemagne