Models of Risk Preferences: Descriptive and Normative Challenges

Behavioural economists have developed alternatives to Expected Utility Theory as descriptive and normative models of risk preferences. One popular view is that these alternative descriptive models are generally better descriptively, but that they tend to be inferior normative models for guiding risky decisions. Models of Risk Preferences collects studies that critically review these two claims from the perspective of experimental economics.

The Research in Experimental Economics series focuses on laboratory experimental economics, but includes theoretical, empirical, or field economic research to encompass the broader experimental economics community.

Glenn W. Harrison is University Distinguished Professor, C.V. Starr Chair of Risk Management & Insurance and Director of the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk, Maurice R. Greenberg School of Risk Science, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. His current research spans risk management & perception, experimental economics, behavioural econometrics, behavioural welfare economics and development economics.

Don Ross is Professor in the School of Society, Politics, and Ethics at University College Cork, Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, and Program Director for Methodology at the Centre for the Economic Analysis of Risk at Georgia State University. His current research focuses on experimental studies and theoretical modeling of risk and time preferences in humans and other animals, gambling disorders and policy, economic methodology, the economics of road transport networks in Africa, and the metaphysical implications of science.