Πειραματικά οικονομικά : μια εμπειρική ανάλυση

Abstract

Despite the fact that expected utility theory (EUT) constitutes the central theory of individual
decision making under risk in economics, experimental findings of the last decades have shown
that this theory does not give a good representation of human behaviour from a descriptive
point of view. The purpose of this paper is the conduct of an experiment (the well-known in
the experimental literature as the ‘Allais paradox’) in which subjects make choices between
relatively safe and risky lotteries. According to our experimental results, there is clear indication
that subjects violate one of the fundamental axioms of EUT: the independence axiom. The
interpretation of the observed behaviour can be given by employing the so-called rank-dependent
theory (RDT). In our case, RDT predicts an inverse-S shaped probability weighting function,
which entails that decision makers overweight small probabilities and underweight large ones.