Male and female choices differ in many economic situations, e.g., on the labor market. This paper considers whether such differences are driven by different attitudes towards competition. In our experiment subjects choose between a tournament and a piecerate pay scheme before performing a real task. Men choose the tournament significantly more often than women. Women are mainly influenced by th...

We characterize a family of r-extended generalized Lorenz dominance quasi-orderings and a family of r-Gini welfare orderings, on the basis of two allegedly “incompatible” axioms for heterogeneous welfare comparisons (Ebert, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003, Shorrocks, 1995), but at the cost of either completeness or separability. JEL classification: D31, D63, I31.

W use a controlled experiment to analyze gender differences in stereotypes about risk preferences of men and women across two distinct island societies in the Pacific: the patrilineal Palawan in the Philippines and the matrilineal Teop in Papua New Guinea. We find no gender differences in actual risk preferences, but we find evidence for culture-specific stereotypes. Like men in Western societi...

This study set out to examine whether shyness, an aversion to novelty and unfamiliar social situations, can affect the processes that underlie early word learning. Twenty-four-month-old children (n =32) were presented with sets of one novel and two familiar objects, and it was found that shyer children were less likely to select a novel object as the referent of a novel label. Furthermore, not-...

We analyze how inequity aversion interacts with incentive provision in an otherwise standard moral hazard model with two risk averse agents. We find that behindness aversion (suffering only when being worse off) among agents unambiguously increases agency costs of providing incentives. This holds true if agents also suffer from being better off unless they account for effort costs in their comp...

In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion using information on selfreports of subjective personal well-being from three datasets: the Gallup World Poll, the European Social Survey, and the World Values Survey. We additionally consider the implications of allowing for health state dependence in the utility function on estimates of risk aversion and examine h...

Health inequality aversion parameters can be used to represent alternative value judgements about policy concern for reducing health inequality versus improving total health. In this study, we use data from an online survey of the general public in England (n = 244) to elicit health inequality aversion parameters for both Atkinson and Kolm social welfare functions. We find median inequality ave...

This paper studies the implications of a societal aversion to inequality for the optimal design of a public health care system. Inequality aversion is introduced by postulating a strictly concave ex post social welfare function. Illnesses are characterized by three factors: the agent’s health with treatment, the agent’s health without treatment, and the cost of treatment. It is shown that the o...

We analyze an extension of the Rothschild-Stiglitz model with ambiguous loss probabilities and ambiguity-averse consumers to determine whether there are adverse or advantageous selection equilibria. We show that non-increasing absolute ambiguity aversion is sufficient for adverse selection. We show generally that actuarially fair pricing is also sufficient for adverse selection and that advanta...

Discounted utilitarianism and the Ramsey equation prevail in the debate on the discount rate on consumption. The utility discount rate is assumed to be constant and to reflect either the uncertainty about the existence of future generations or a pure preference for the present. We question the unique status of discounted utilitarianism and discuss the implications of alternative criteria addres...