Essays in Experimental Economics and the Improvement of Judgment and Decision Making

Abstract

This dissertation presents essays on the relationship between judgment and decision making and public policy, with a focus on gender diversity. The gender di erence in career advancement is the likely result both of decisions made on the supply side (i.e. female and male job candidates) as well as decisions on the demand side (i.e. evaluators). These essays explore the behavioral foundations of decision making processes on both sides, and also make recommendations on how to use these behavioral insights to improve decisions, as well as increase gender diversity. The first essay, Opening the Black Box of Gender Di erences in Risk Taking, experimentally tests the drivers behind increased risk aversion of females. The essay demonstrates that this gender di erence is not driven by di erences in probability weighting but by di erences in the valuation of outcomes. In addition, in environments where probabilities and outcomes are not common knowledge, females expect a higher chance of a bad outcome to occur, and dislike the bad outcome more. Controlling for the expected probabilities and the valuation of outcomes eliminates the gender di erence in risk preferences, except for monetary risks. The second essay, Risk in the Background: How Men and Women Respond, experimentally tests the gender-specific e ect of risk in the decision environment on subsequent risk taking. It demonstrates that females increase risk taking after an increase in income and in the presence of an unrealized risk with strictly positive

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.