Safe options induce gender differences in risk attitudes
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty
We test whether the often (but not always) observed gender difference in risk attitudes depends on the presence (or absence) of a safe option. Across four widespread risk elicitation task, we find this hypothesis to (mostly) hold.
Abstract
Gender differences in risk attitudes have recently been shown to be context-dependent rather than ubiquitous. We manipulate three widely used risk elicitation tasks to test whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives can explain the heterogeneity of the findings. We find that the availability of a safe option induces significant effects in two out of three tasks. Despite the well-known instability of elicited risk preferences, we show with a structural model that the effect on risk attitudes is rather stable across tasks, but not sufficiently strong to reach traditional significance levels.