性别对待金融风险及不确定性的差异.pdfVIP

Gender Specific Attitudes Towards Risk and Ambiguity: An Experimental Investigation Renate Schubert* Matthias Gysler* Martin Brown* Hans-Wolfgang Brachinger** This Version: July 2000 *Center for Economic Research, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, CH- 8092 Zürich. ** Seminar of Statistics, University of Fribourg, CH- 1700 Fribourg Corresponding Author: Matthias Gysler, Tel.: ++41 1 632 7969, Fax ++41 632 1042, matthias.gysler@wif.gess.ethz.ch Abstract On the one hand, empirical evidence shows that in financial markets women seem to behave more risk averse than men. On the other hand there is experimental showing that in risky decisions controlled for opportunity sets only the context matters. In investment and insurance contexts with given probabilities women seem to expose approximately the same risk aversion as men. However, in real-life decisions the probability information is rather ambiguous. Therefore also the framing of information may be important. We conducted a lottery experiment introducing three types of probability information: pure risk, weak ambiguity and strong ambiguity. Our main result is that gender differences may arise in ambiguity frames: women are more ambiguity averse than men in the investment context, but not in the insurance context. Keywords: gender, risk, financial markets, risk aversion, ambiguity 1 1. Introduction When dealing with financial decision making, one is often confronted with a gender stereotype, i.e. with t