An Experimental Study of Decision-Making Behavior under Uncertainty
Autor: | Mei-Hua Tsai, 蔡美華 |
---|---|
Rok vydání: | 2006 |
Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
Popis: | 94 Decision-making under uncertainty attracts the research interests of many experimental economists. With a good experiment laboratory, it is now quite easy to gather enough data to run estimations for each single individual subject. In 2005, we designed lottery experiment with monetary rewards and recruited 33 undergraduate students in the Department of Economics and Law School of Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan. The z-Tree program was employed to operate the experiment in the computer lab. Each subject made 120 pricing decisions, 96 positive reward lotteries and 24 negative ones. With these data, we are able to estimate, for each individual, utility functions and probability weighting functions. We tested for various functional forms of expected utility theory and prospect theory, both with individual data and group data. For both positive and negative reward lotteries, we find that PT could better explain our subject behavior. But the monetary utility function seems to have a quadratic form for positive reward lotteries and exponential form for negative reward lotteries. However, for individual estimations to be meaningful we need to be assured that, at individual level, the behavior patterns have certain degree of stability. So in 2006, we design lottery experiment with monetary rewards and recruited 27 undergraduate students in the Department of Economics and Law School of Soochow University. Each subject made 108 pricing decisions, 54 positive and 54 negative reward lotteries. We estimate, for each individual, utility functions and probability weighting functions with this panel data design. We tested for various functional forms of expected utility theory and prospect theory. With this design, we try to answer the following question: in the individual level, do there really exist stable behavior patterns. |
Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
Externí odkaz: |