1 Gender , Personality Traits and the

This paper analyzes gender differences in ambiguity and whether they can be explained by differences in personality traits. In an experiment with 347 high school students, we investigate choices under ambiguity and link ambiguity to cognitive and personality traits. Participants value ambiguity less than risk. Women are more risk averse, while men are more ambiguity averse than women. Conditioning on risk aversion, the gender gap in ambiguity vanishes. Results for a representative sample of experimenters differ from results using a subset of volunteers. Psychometric measures are more strongly related to risk than to ambiguity. Conditioning on these measures explains roughly 20% of the difference in ambiguity aversion between men and women. 1 This paper has benefited from comments by Steffen Altmann, Liam Delaney, Thomas Dohmen, Angela Lee Duckworth, Philipp Eisenhauer, Armin Falk, Helga Fehr-Duda, Lars Peter Hansen, Michael Hurd, Erin Krupka, Peter Neary, Friedhelm Pfeiffer, Arthur van Soest, Harald Uhlig, Terry Vaughn and participants of the 2008 EEA conference in Milan and the Conference on Understanding Economic Decision-making in Jackson Hole. We thank Stella Maris High School for support in the organization of the experiment. The research was financed partly by Golsteyn’s Meteor research grant M.08.5217. Golsteyn thanks IZA where he stayed during this research for its hospitality. 2 Additional information about the experiment is available in Borghans et al. (2009). 3 Corresponding author: [email protected].