Morality Meets Risk: Excuse-Driven Risk Preference Predictions and Gender Stereotypes

The experiment consists of two parts and adopts a within-subject design. The first part is a decision task for subjects to elicit their excuse-driven risk preferences. Participants first complete a normalization price list including 16 binary decisions between 30 yuan for themselves and some amounts for their partners. Participants then make binary decisions between riskless amounts and risky lotteries for themselves or their partners in 12 price lists. Across the 12 price lists, participants will encounter two types of lotteries (self-lotteries and others-lotteries), two types of valuations (self-valuations and others-valuations), and 3 different probabilities, i.e. {75%, 50%, 25%}. Price lists will be presented in a random order for each participant.
The second part is a prediction task to investigate participants’ predictions of others’ excuse-driven behavior under the same risk scenarios. Participants will predict which choice they think their prediction target may make if their target is either male or female. The gender is randomly selected but remains the same for participants after randomization.
The decision and prediction tasks are presented in random order at the individual level.

2024-04-13

2024-05-22

excuse-driven risk preference of each participant (D[g]);
excuse-driven risk preferences of the men (D[m]);
excuse-driven risk preferences of the women (D[f]);
individuals' predictions for others’ excuse-driven risk preferences (P[g]);
other four types of predictions for others’ excuse-driven risk preferences:
-males’ predictions for males (P[m;m]);
-males’ predictions for females (P[m;f]);
-females’ predictions for males (P[f;m]);
-females’ predictions for females (P[f;f]).

Building upon the work of Dong and Zheng (2023), we will conduct a laboratory experiment consisting of two main parts: a decision task and a prediction task. The decision task will assess the excuse-driven risk preferences of subjects, while the prediction task will evaluate their predictions of others’ excuse-driven behavior under the same risk scenarios. In the decision task, participants first complete a normalization price list including 16 binary decisions between 30 yuan for themselves and some amounts for their partners. Participants then complete binary decisions between riskless amounts and risky lotteries for themselves or their partners in 12 price lists. We can estimate their certainty equivalences of different lotteries based on their responses to risk, which reflect their excuse-driven risk preferences. In the prediction task, participants face the same decision tasks as in the decision task. Instead of making decisions for themselves, participants predict the responses to these tasks by other participants in their session. Their prediction target may be male or female, determined randomly. We will also collect subjects' genders to investigate the gender differences in predicting others’ behaviors.

Not available

randomization done by a computer.

individual.

No

200 full-time students from Renmin University of China (100 males and 100 females).

200 full-time students from Renmin University of China (100 males and 100 females).

200 subjects in the decision task and 200 subjects in the prediction task.