Numerosity and tangibility in investment decisions (Study 2)

We will recruit participants from Prolific. They will participate in an online experiment that collects both independent and dependent measures, i.e., participants’ decisions in five experimental conditions (between-subjects design).

We will measure the participants' risk preference using parameters of the original Gneezy and Potters (1994) game and risk perception.
We compare the risk preference metric between five treatments varying the experimental currency, which is either Pence or Tokens. The variation takes place in the wording and the endowment, which is either 200 Pence or 200 Tokens, 2000 Tokens, 20000 Tokens or 200000 Tokens.

2025-10-15

2025-10-30

Fraction of endowment invested in the Investment Game.
The risk perceived in the risk perception task (from 1-7).

We compare these metrics between five treatments varying the experimental currency, which is either Pence or Tokens. The variation takes place in the wording and the endowment, which is either 200 Pence or 200 Tokens, 2000 Tokens, 20000 Tokens or 200000 Tokens.

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Controls:
Gender, Age, Income Level (0-10), Knowledge about financial investment (1-5), Level of Education (Primary to Post-Graduate), English native language (Yes, No), Country of birth, Understood the task (1-5)

Participants will be recruited via Prolific. We will use the software Qualtrics to code the experiment.

Step 1: Presentation of consent form. Participants who refuse to sign will stop the experiment at this stage.
Step 2: Randomisation into treatments (see treatment details below) when sending the session link to participants. Each session corresponds to a treatment, following a between-subjects approach.
Step 3: General instructions and payment information. Details are given on the experiment's duration, payment procedures and anonymity.
Step 4: Task to determine participants' risk perception; they observe a lottery and state how risky they perceive it to be between 1 and 7. (leading to primary outcome 2)
Step 5: Treatment instructions. Participants are presented with the instructions for the respective treatment that they were randomly allocated into.
Step 6: Make an investment decision; participents get an endowment (treatment variable) and state how much to invest of this endowment in a risky project that pays 2.5 times the investment with 1/3 probability and nothing with 2/3 probability - investment is lost (leading to primary outcome 1)
Step 7: Short survey (leading to secondary outcomes)
Step 8: Result of investment decision
Step 9: Land at Prolific.

The participants click the link to the Qualtrics Survey. In the Qualtrics Survey, we make use of the "Randomizer" in the survey flow where participants will be randomly allocated to one of the treatments. It aims to allocate in a way that participants are equally distributed to the treatments such that the number of participants per treatments is the same.

The participants will be allocated to one of the following treatments with the endowments 200 Pence, 200 Tokens, 2000 Tokens, 20000 Tokens or 200000 Tokens.

Individual

No

One cluster, prolific participants from the UK >> 525 participants

105 per treatment

105 per treatment in total 525

For a t-test, cohen’s D for a 10% difference and a SD of 0.2517 is 0.3973 and for the respective power and significance level we get a sample size of 100.42. (in g-power 101 with an actual power of 0.8023). For a permutation test, we need at least 96 observations to get a power of 0.8367(using bootstrapping given data from Füllbrunn and Luhan (2020) for the same task using their data.