The effect of time pressure on risky financial decisions from description and decisions from experience

Abstract

Time pressure has been found to impact decision making in various ways, but studies on the effects time pressure in risky financial gambles have been largely limited to description-based decision tasks and to the gain domain. We present two experiments that investigated the effect of time pressure on decisions from description and decisions from experience, across both gain and loss domains. In description-based choice, time pressure decreased risk seeking for losses, whereas for gains there was a trend in the opposite direction. In experience-based choice, no impact of time pressure was observed on risk-taking, suggesting that time constraints may not alter attitudes towards risk when outcomes are learned through experience.