Title: Measuring Ambiguity Attitudes for All (Natural) Events

Speaker: Associate Professor Zhenxing Huang, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Time: April 5th 2017 13:30–14:45

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics, JNU)

Abstract:

Measurements of ambiguity attitudes have so far focused on artificial events, where subjective beliefs can be derived from symmetry assumptions. For natural events such assumptions usually are not available, creating a difficulty in calibrating subjective beliefs and, hence, in measuring ambiguity attitudes. This paper introduces a simple control for subjective beliefs even when they are unknown. We thus allow for a tractable and completely revealed-preference based measurement of ambiguity attitudes for all events, including natural ones. We introduce indexes of ambiguity aversion and ambiguity perception (or understanding) that generalize and unify many existing indexes. Our indexes are valid under many ambiguity theories. They do not require expected utility for risk, which is desirable for empirical purposes. Furthermore, they are easy to elicit in practice. An experiment on ambiguity under time pressure shows the tractability of our method. It gives plausible results, supporting the validity of our indexes.