scholarly journals The risk elicitation puzzle revisited: Across-methods (in)consistency?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Holzmeister ◽  
Matthias Stefan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Experimental Design ◽  
Risk Preferences ◽  
Risk Preference ◽  
Preference Elicitation ◽  
Risk Attitudes ◽  
Aggregate Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Simulation Exercises

Abstract With the rise of experimental research in the social sciences, numerous methods to elicit and classify people’s risk attitudes in the laboratory have evolved. However, evidence suggests that attitudes towards risk may vary considerably when measured with different methods. Based on a within-subject experimental design using four widespread risk preference elicitation tasks, we find that the different methods indeed give rise to considerably varying estimates of individual and aggregate level risk preferences. Conducting simulation exercises to obtain benchmarks for subjects’ behavior, we find that the observed heterogeneity in risk preference estimates across methods is qualitatively similar to the heterogeneity arising from independent random draws from the choice distributions observed in the experiment. Our study, however, provides evidence that subjects are surprisingly well aware of the variation in the riskiness of their choices. We argue that this calls into question the common interpretation of variation in revealed risk preferences as being inconsistent.

scholarly journals The Risk Elicitation Puzzle Revisited: Across-Methods (In)consistency?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Holzmeister ◽  
Matthias Stefan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Risk Preferences ◽  
Risk Preference ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Aggregate Level ◽  
Subject Design ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
Simulation Exercises

With the rise of experimental methods in the social sciences, numerous methods to elicit and classify people's risk attitudes in the laboratory have evolved. However, evidence suggests that people's attitudes towards risk may change considerably when measured with different methods. Based on a with-subject design using four widespread risk elicitation methods, we find that different procedures indeed give rise to considerably varying estimates of individual and aggregate level risk preferences. Conducting simulation exercises to obtain benchmarks for subjects' behavior, we find that the observed heterogeneity in risk preference estimates across methods is qualitatively similar to the heterogeneity arising from independent random draws from choices in the experimental tasks. Our study, however, provides evidence that subjects are surprisingly well aware of the variation in the riskiness of their choices. We argue that this calls into question the common interpretation of variation in revealed risk preferences being inconsistent.

What Theology Should and Should Not Learn from the Social Sciences About the Common Good

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary L. Hirschfeld
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Catholic Social Thought ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

There are two ways to answer the question, What can Catholic social thought learn from the social sciences about the common good? A more modern form of Catholic social thought, which primarily thinks of the common good in terms of the equitable distribution of goods like health, education, and opportunity, could benefit from the extensive literature in public policy, economics, and political science, which study the role of institutions and policies in generating desirable social outcomes. A second approach, rooted in pre-Machiavellian Catholic thought, would expand on this modern notion to include concerns about the way the culture shapes our understanding of what genuine human flourishing entails. On that account, the social sciences offer a valuable description of human life; but because they underestimate how human behavior is shaped by institutions, policies, and the discourse of social science itself, their insights need to be treated with caution.

scholarly journals Improved Rice Technology Adoption: The Role of Spatially-Dependent Risk Preference

Agriculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 691
Author(s):  
Omotuyole Isiaka Ambali ◽  
Francisco Jose Areal ◽  
Nikolaos Georgantzis
Keyword(s):  
Field Experiments ◽  
Climatic Factors ◽  
Risk Preferences ◽  
Risk Preference ◽  
Probit Model ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
High Yield ◽  
Risk Attitudes ◽  
Policy Action ◽  
Rice Varieties

This study analyses farmers’ adoption of improved rice technology, taking into account farmers’ risk preferences; the unobserved spatial heterogeneity associated with farmers’ risk preferences; farmers’ household and farm characteristics; farm locations, farmers’ access to information, and their perceptions on the rice improved varieties (i.e., high yield varieties, HYV). The study used data obtained from field experiments and a survey conducted in 2016 in Nigeria. An instrumental-variable probit model was estimated to account for potential endogenous farmers’ risk preference in the adoption decision model. Results show that risk averse (risk avoidant) farmers are less likely to adopt HYV, with the spatial lags of farmers’ risk attitudes found to be a good instrument for spatially unobserved variables (e.g., environmental and climatic factors). We conclude that studies supporting policy action aiming at the diffusion of improved rice varieties need to collect information, if possible, on farmers’ risk attitudes, local environmental and climatic conditions (e.g., climatic, topographic, soil quality, pest incidence) in order to ease the design and evaluation of policy actions on the adoption of improved agricultural technology.

Respondents in Asian Cultures (e.g., Chinese) are More Risk-Seeking and More Overconfident than Respondents in Other Cultures (e.g., in United States) but the Reciprocal Predictions are in Total Opposition: How and Why?

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu Li ◽  
Yongqing Fang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Risk Preferences ◽  
Risk Preference ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Variations ◽  
Risk Seeking ◽  
The Social ◽  
Predicted Risk

AbstractTriggered by rather surprising findings that respondents in Asian cultures (e.g., Chinese) are more risk-seeking and more overconfident than respondents in other cultures (e.g., in United States) and that the reciprocal predictions are in total opposition, four experiments were designed to extend previous collective-culture oriented researches. Results revealed that (1) Singapore 21, which is a vision of Singapore in the 21st century and has highlighted the promotion of a collective culture, did not advocate greater risk-seeking but led to weaker overconfidence; (2) the knowledge of "financial help from social network" did not permit prediction of risk preference but the knowledge of "the value difference between possible outcomes" did; (3) the social network could be viewed not only as a positive "cushion" but also as a negative "burden" in both gain and loss domains of risky choices; (4) the predictions of the risk-as-value, risk-as-feelings and stereotype hypotheses were not consistent with the predicted risk preferences of others but the predictions of the economic-performance hypothesis were consistent with the predicted risk preferences as well as the predicted overconfidence of others. The implications for cross-cultural variations in overconfidence and for cross-cultural variations in risk-taking were discussed.

scholarly journals Scaling the slippery slope

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachariah Basehore
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Slippery Slope ◽  
Complete Picture ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

For over a half-century, psychologists, educators, and researchers have criticized the common misusesof statistics in the social sciences. Here, I summarize some of the various objections to the blind use ofp-values and propose simple adjustments to 1) ameliorate the weaknesses inherent in current statisticalpractice, and 2) to paint a more complete picture of a study’s results.

Test

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-142
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Serial Killers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Personal Consequences ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Impact

This final chapter explores yet further examples of how the principles of testing can be applied within the social sciences. As with the previous chapters, the authors begin by asking students to Google questions and then use the results Google provides to ask more sophisticated questions about the impact and personal consequences of the question. They begin by asking a question about how serial killer, Harold Shipman, was able to escape suspicion for as long as he did. They then take up a question about the common traits of serial killers, paying attention to the effects of the traits and how these traits may have personal connections to students. They conclude the chapter with a section about how we might make the decision to eat a third candy bar.

Condorget: Politics and Reason

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 110-139
Author(s):  
Ian White
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Mathematical Treatment ◽  
Political Sciences ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mathematical Discipline ◽  
The Common ◽  
Universal Applicability

From the time of its clearest origins with Pascal, the theory of probabilities seemed to offer means by which the study of human affairs might be reduced to the same kind of mathematical discipline that was already being achieved in the study of nature. Condorcet is to a great extent merely representative of the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were led on by the prospect of developing moral and political sciences on the pattern of the natural sciences, specifically physics. The development of economics and the social sciences, from the eighteenth century onwards, may be said in part to have fulfilled and in a manner to have perpetuated these ambitions. In so far as the new sciences have been susceptible of mathematical treatment, this has not been confined to the calculus of probabilities. But there is a temptation at every stage to ascribe fundamental significance and universal applicability to each latest mathematical device that is strikingly useful or illuminating on its first introduction. It is the theory of games that enjoys this position at present, and shapes the common contemporary conception of the very same problems that preoccupied Condorcet.

Evolutionary social science beyond culture

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-356
Author(s):  
Harold Kincaid
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Explanations ◽  
The Common

Mesoudi et al.'s case can be improved by expanding to compelling selectionist explanations elsewhere in the social sciences and by seeing that natural selection is an instance of general selectionist process. Obstacles include the common use of extreme idealizations and optimality evidence, the copresence of nonselectionist social processes, and the fact that selectionist explanations often presuppose other kinds of social explanations.

Institutional Design for Collective Action: Tweaking the Rules of the Game for the Common Good

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heinz-Dieter Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Peer Review ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Urban Safety ◽  
The Common ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Abstract At present, institutional design is an under-theorized and underdeveloped part of the social sciences. In this paper I focus on designs for situations of collective action where the outcome is controlled by the choices of several self-interested actors. In those situations the goal of institutional design is to alter the rules of the game so that self-interested actors find it rational to cooperate. I explore the viability of that definition by considering two examples of institutional design: urban safety and academic peer review. I discuss the implications of my findings for our conception of rational self-interest and propose that three design principles – publicity, boundaries, and contiguity – can be inferred from the analysis.

scholarly journals Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

This is an "debates" essay that critiques the common archaeological construct that our scholarship is divided between the humanities and the natural sciences. I argue that the social sciences provide a third alternative that is particularly germane to archaeological goals of reconstructing past societies. Deficiencies of post-processual archaeological perspectives are highlighted.

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