Speaker: Han Bleichrodt (Erasmus University Rotterdam and ANU)

Date, Time and Venue: Friday, 23 February 2018, 12:00-13:00, room 260-6115 [Business School Building, Level 6]

Title: Testing Hurwicz Expected Utility

Abstract: Gul and Pesendorfer (2015) propose a new theory of ambiguity, they dub Hurwicz expected utility (HEU). HEU is the first axiomatic theory that is consistent with most of the available empirical evidence on decision under uncertainty. We show that HEU is also tractable and a particular subclass can readily be estimated and tested. We do this by requiring the probability weighting functions in the HEU representation to come from a two-parameter family. We investigate two predictions of HEU. The first prediction is that ambiguity aversion is constant across different sources of ambiguity. We investigate this utilizing the data of Abdellaoui et al. (2011). We observe support for it in their most extensive data set, but not in the other data set. The second prediction is that ambiguity aversion and first-order risk aversion (Segal and Spivak, 1990) are positively correlated. We perform an experiment to test this prediction. As the positive correlation revealed in the data is only slight to fair we conclude the evidence of a positive relation between ambiguity aversion and first order risk aversion is not conclusive.

Everyone welcome!