Essays in Decision Making Under Risk and Uncertainty

Alam, Jess and Georgalos, Konstantinos and Winter, Eyal (2026) Essays in Decision Making Under Risk and Uncertainty. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

his thesis consists of three chapters that focus on decision making under uncertainty. The first of these chapters focuses on decision making for others, the second on different risk attitudes of males and females, and the third on wishful thinking in strategic games. In the first chapter, I conduct an experiment on decision making on behalf of others, and assess the difference between decision making for oneself and others under perfect and partial information. I use a lottery task to assess the risk preferences in each treatment group, and use the model outlined by Gurdal et al. (2013) to identify the impact of partial information on blame. The second chapter considers the gender difference in risk attitudes between males and females with inconclusive results. We use use a model that allows for a degree of heterogeneity between individuals, where males and females risk attitudes are drawn from two separate distributions as opposed to one value for males and one for females. We take data from three experiments where gender effects where not found and, using this method we find gender effects. The second chapter was jointly co-authored with Konstantinos Georgalos and Harrison Rolls and has been published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 202, 2022, 168-183. The third and final chapter of this focuses on wishful thinking in strategic games. This adapts an existing belief model used by Nyarko and Schotter (2002), adjusted to account for the possibility of wishful thinking. We then apply this model to the original dataset from Nyarko and Schotter (2002) and a new dataset from Attanasi et al. (2018), which provides data from an alternative game. We find evidence to support the presence of wishful thinking in both games.