Risk preferences and personality traits in children and adolescents

Marco Piovesan*, Helene Willadsen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

We elicit both risk preferences and personality traits of 340 children aged 7–16 and enrolled in Danish schools: we elicit risk preferences using a modified–and simplified–version of the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task, and to measure personality traits we use the HEXACO (parent-report) questionnaire. Our results show that, on average, children are risk averse, become more risk taking with age, and that girls are, on average, more risk averse than boys. On the contrary, personality traits are stable across ages, except for a slight decrease in Openness to Experience. Personality and risk preferences are not correlated either when looking at raw correlations or regressions, including controls. The results suggest that risk preferences and personality traits are complementary measures of individual heterogeneity of behavior.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Volume186
Pages (from-to)523-532
Number of pages10
ISSN0167-2681
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank the Carlsberg Foundation for generous financial support (Project: 108579). The activities of CEBI are financed by the Danish National Research Foundation, Grant DNRF134. We are grateful to the many colleagues and student assistants have helped us in planning and running this experiment. We thank Ingo Zettler, Paolo Crosetto, Antonio Filippin and the participants of the Social and Biological Roots of Economics Workshop at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy for constructive comments.

Funding Information:
We thank the Carlsberg Foundation for generous financial support (Project: 108579). The activities of CEBI are financed by the Danish National Research Foundation, Grant DNRF134. We are grateful to the many colleagues and student assistants have helped us in planning and running this experiment. We thank Ingo Zettler, Paolo Crosetto, Antonio Filippin and the participants of the Social and Biological Roots of Economics Workshop at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy for constructive comment

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021

Keywords

  • Behavioral economics
  • Experiment with children
  • Personality
  • Risk preferences

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