Maria J. MONTOYA-VILLALOBOS  – Measuring ambiguity aversion: Hypothetical or Incentivized

Maria Montoya-Villalobos is a postdoctoral researcher at IESEG School of Management at the iRisk research center. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental economics, behavioral economics, and the economics of uncertainty. She studies how individuals make decisions under uncertainty and how they shape responses to pro-environmental behaviors and environmental public policies. Her work combines theoretical modeling, grounded in public economics and decision theory, with experimental economics.

Summary of the presentation

Measuring ambiguity preferences using monetary incentives is both costly and time-consuming. We propose and test a non-incentivized, survey-friendly method for eliciting ambiguity attitudes. Our approach presents participants with binary choices between bets on known and unknown urns a la Ellsberg, followed by a rating of the strength of their preference for the chosen option. We compare ambiguity preferences elicited through our hypothetical method with those obtained via incentivized matching probabilities, first in a laboratory experiment with students, and then in an online experiment with a large, representative sample of French population. We show that the hypothetical tasks successfully capture ambiguity aversion, but they fail to capture the other component of ambiguity attitudes, ambiguity-generated insensitivity. These results contribute new evidence on the validity of non-incentivized measures of economic preferences in the important domain of ambiguity.

Interested ?! please let me know: Marie Pelé (marie.pele@univ-catholille.fr)