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Gender differences in the stability of risk attitudes

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty volume 63, pages 169–201 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

We investigate gender differences in the stability of risk preferences over time and across stake sizes of lottery choices. Subjects participate in a 12-week, online experiment with high- and low-stakes lottery choices. Our study incorporates self-reported measures of the states of mind of the participants – specifically sources and levels of stress and happiness, as well as financial well-being – to explain the weekly lottery choices of males and females. At the aggregate level, we do not observe a significant gender difference in average risk attitudes either within or across stakes. For both genders, risk tolerance for low-stakes lotteries increases over time; for high-stakes lotteries, only females become more risk tolerant. At the individual level, both genders exhibit a relatively high level of choice stability. For both males and females there is some evidence that risk tolerance increases across time for low-stake lotteries. We observe a gender difference in the response to stress and happiness. Males become more risk tolerant at both stake sizes when experiencing family-sourced stress. For females, we find greater risk aversion for high-stakes lotteries when experiencing university-sourced stress and relationship-sourced happiness and greater risk tolerance when feeling more financially stable. Males exhibit a decrease in the instability (variability) of lottery choices as time passes, suggesting learning or increasing comfort with riskier choices with experience. Finally, regardless of gender, roughly equal numbers of subjects exhibit risk tolerance that is decreasing, constant, or increasing with stakes, and the risk tolerance of our subjects across stakes are relatively stable.

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. The Eckel and Grossman task is similar to that developed by Binswanger (1980, 1981) for use in rural India.

  2. Higher financial risk aversion among females may explain lesser wealth possession by females as compared to males.

  3. Participants do not see the right five columns reporting Expected Payoffs, Risk, and CRRA range.

  4. Participants do not see the right three columns reporting Expected Payoffs and CRRA range.

  5. A number of studies have compared the Holt and Laury and Eckel Grossman tasks, as well as other elicitation methods (Dave et al. 2010; Charness et al. 2013; Crosetto and Filippin 2016).

  6. Inconsistencies are much more common in studies in developing countries (Charness and Viceisza 2016; Jacobson and Petrie 2009).

  7. Csermely and Rabas (2016) note, enforcing a single switching point means non-detection of people with inconsistent preferences. Andersen et al. (2006) offers a more detailed discussion of the issues with the multiple price list elicitation format.

  8. The staff and students at Monash University use Moodle mostly for course unit details. We created our own Moodle webpage for this experiment. Moodle enabled us to restrict the times during which participants could access the surveys and decision tasks.

  9. We could have paid participants for every lottery decision made but this would introduce different problems. First, there would be income effects as payoffs are earned from week to week. This could result in increased or decreased risk taking. Second, participants could diversify their risk taking, taking greater risks in some weeks and less risk in others or within a week taking more risk in, say, Holt/Laury and Eckel/Grossman and less risk in 10Eckel/Grossman. We believe the design chosen was likely to introduce the fewest confounds.

  10. Responses were re-scaled from the original scale of 1 to 100.

  11. Appendix B, Table 2 (in the Electronic Supplementary Material), reports summary statistics by gender for time-invariant participant characteristics. Other than the likelihood of attending a single-sex (primary or secondary) school (p < 0.01) and likelihood of residing with parents (p = 0.01), the differences between male and female participants in terms of time-invariant characteristics are insignificant.

  12. Alternative measures might include lottery in which the last Option A choice was made or the lottery in which the first Option B was made, neither of which better deals with inconsistent choices.

  13. In week 1, 30.6% and 27.3% of females and males, respectively, made multiple switches and 19.4% and 15.2% of females and males, respectively, made dominated alternative choices. Regressing the two indicators of inconsistent choices on Week, we do not find that errors of these sorts either significantly increase or decrease over the 12-week period, either for the full sample or for males and females separately (results available upon request).

  14. Spearman’s rho by week are reported in Appendix B, Table 3 (in the Electronic Supplementary Material). With few exceptions, the risk elicitation measures are significantly correlated (p < 0.05 in all but a few weeks).

  15. Holt and Laury (2002) find that males are slightly more risk tolerant at their low stakes, but that the differences disappear at the higher stakes.

  16. For completeness, Appendix B, Table 4 (in the Electronic Supplementary Material) reports the comparison between standardized EG and standardized HL.

  17. Given the small number of weeks, this is only an approximate measure of stability of risk preferences across time.

  18. Booth et al. (2014) find that females who attended single-sex schools were more risk tolerant than those who attended mixed-sex schools.

  19. We also ran linear probability panel data models with similar results (see Appendix B, Table 6, in the Electronic Supplementary Material)).

  20. Results for regressions 6–17 are reported in Appendix Table 7 (in the Electronic Supplementary Material). Complete results are available upon request.

  21. Panel regression results were also estimated (see Appendix B, Table 8 in the Electronic Supplementary Material).

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Economics, Monash University. We thank the editor and anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, XIM University, Odisha, 752050, India

    Anwesha Bandyopadhyay

  2. National Board of Revenue, Ministry of Finance, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Lutfunnahar Begum

  3. Department of Economics, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Philip J. Grossman

  4. Rasmuson Chair, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK, USA

    Philip J. Grossman

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  1. Anwesha Bandyopadhyay
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  3. Philip J. Grossman
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Correspondence to Philip J. Grossman.

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Bandyopadhyay, A., Begum, L. & Grossman, P.J. Gender differences in the stability of risk attitudes. J Risk Uncertain 63, 169–201 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-021-09361-w

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Keywords

  • Risk
  • Lotteries
  • Stability
  • Gender
  • High and low stakes

JEL classification

  • C91
  • D03
  • D81