The effect of domain and framing on elicited risk aversion

Abstract

Experimental literature has found that risk attitudes are not robust to different elicitation techniques. However, most comparisons across elicitation methods involve different rewards and framings simultaneously. Our experimental design helps to disentangle the effect of these two factors. We consider two different personal rewards (money domain and grade domain) and two different scenarios while keeping the reward constant (lottery framing and exam framing). We find no differences in elicited risk aversion between the two domains. However, framing matters: elicited risk aversion is lower in the exam framing.