Structural measures of higher order risk attitudes have well‐developed foundations in Expected Utility Theory (EUT), but little is known about their empirical magnitudes. We introduce a novel experimental design and a companion econometric model that allows us to structurally estimate indices of risk aversion, prudence, and temperance under EUT without imposing restrictions on their interdependence. We find that indices of absolute risk aversion, prudence, and temperance exhibit distinct patterns of variation over income, and that predicted risk premia under EUT and Rank‐Dependent Utility Theory gradually converge as the order of risk increases. These findings are obscured by regular parametric utility functions, which inherently bias results toward prudence and temperance when subjects are risk averse. The results remain robust in subsamples of moderate size, which suggests that our approach can be adopted in broader studies that link higher order risk attitudes to other domains of latent individual preferences and economic behavior.

Estimating Individual Discount Rates in Denmark: A Field Experiment by Glenn W. Harrison, Morten I. Lau and Melonie B. Williams. Published in volume 92, issue 5, pages 1606-1617 of American Economic Review, December 2002

We design an experiment to test the hypothesis that, in violation of Bayes’ rule, some people respond more forcefully to the strength of information than to its weight. We provide incentives to motivate effort, use naturally occurring information, and control for risk attitude. We find that the strength–weight bias affects expectations but that its magnitude is significantly lower than originally reported. Controls for nonlinear utility further reduce the bias. Our results suggest that incentive compatibility and controls for risk attitude considerably affect inferences on errors in expectations.

We evaluate the temporal stability of risk preferences using a remarkable data set that combines sociodemographic information from the Danish Civil Registry with information on risk attitudes from a longitudinal field experiment. Our econometric model accounts for endogenous sample selection and attrition processes that may confound inferences about temporal stability. Our experimental design builds in randomization on the incentives for participation that facilitates empirical identification of the model. In general, we find evidence consistent with temporal stability after correcting for the effects of selection and attrition. When neglected, these effects change our inferences in an economically and statistically significant manner.

We design experiments to jointly elicit risk and time preferences for the adult Danish population. Since subjects are generally risk averse, we find that joint elicitation provides estimates of discount rates that are significantly lower than those found in previous studies and more in line with what would be considered as a priori reasonable rates. The statistical specification relies on a theoretical framework that involves a latent trade-off between long-run optimization and short-run temptation. Estimation of this specification is undertaken using structural, maximum likelihood methods. Our main results based on exponential discounting are robust to alternative specifications such as hyperbolic discounting. These results have direct implications for attempts to elicit time preferences, as well as debates over the appropriate domain of the utility function when characterizing risk aversion and time consistency.

We provide evidence that choices over small-stakes bets are consistent with assumptions of some payoff calibration paradoxes. We then exploit the existence of detailed information on individual wealth of our experimental subjects in Denmark and directly estimate risk attitudes and the degree of asset integration. We discover that behavior is consistent with partial, rather than full, asset integration. The implied risk attitudes from estimating these specifications indicate risk premiums and certainty equivalents that are a priori plausible. This theory and evidence suggest one constructive solution to payoff calibration paradoxes.