Event

Stated vs. revealed preferences?

Unpacking the measurement of people's risk preferences

  • Tue 8 Dec 20

    14:00 - 15:00

  • Online

    Zoom

  • Event speaker

    Dr Renato Frey

  • Event type

    Lectures, talks and seminars

  • Event organiser

    Psychology, Department of

  • Contact details

    Dr Giulia Poerio

How can we best measure risk-taking? Find out more from Dr Renato Frey.

Risk preference constitutes a key construct in the behavioral sciences, and in some applied settings (e.g., finance) the assessment of people’s risk preference is even required by law.

But how best to do so? Different sub-disciplines in psychology and economics have employed various approaches to this end: Some rely on self-report measures to tap "stated preferences", whereas others rely on behavioural tasks to elicit "revealed preferences".

In this talk Dr Frey will first review evidence from a comprehensive empirical investigation of the psychometric structure of the construct of risk preference and its measurement, which highlighted that different types of measures diverge quite strongly in terms of various psychometric properties.

In the second part of the talk, he will provide possible explanations for this observation, by i) unpacking people’s representations of their risk preferences and modelling the cognitive information-integration processes underlying their self-reports, and ii) examining the role of “representative design” in one of the state-of-the-art behavioural measures of risk taking. He will conclude with some thoughts on how to advance the measurement of risk taking in the future.

Speaker

Dr Renato Frey is a SNSF Ambizione Fellow at the University of Basel.

How to attend

This seminar will be held on Zoom. To receive a Zoom link please email Dr Giulia Poerio (g.poerio@essex.ac.uk) or Dr Matteo Lisi (m.lisi@essex.ac.uk) with the date and title of the seminar you wish to attention.