Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/51875 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5575
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
An ever increasing number of experiments attempts to elicit risk preferences of a population of interest with the aim of calibrating parameters used in economic models. We are concerned with two types of selection effects, which may affect the external validity of standard experiments: Sampling from a narrowly defined population of students (experimenter-induced selection) and self-selection of participants into the experiment. We find that both types of selection lead to a sample of experts: Participants perform significantly better than the general population, in the sense of fewer violations of revealed preference conditions. Self-selection within a broad population does not seem to matter for average preferences. In contrast, sampling from a student population leads to lower estimates of average risk aversion and loss aversion parameters. Furthermore, it dramatically reduces the amount of heterogeneity in all parameters.
Subjects: 
risk aversion
loss aversion
internet surveys
laboratory experiments
JEL: 
C90
D81
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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