Gender differences in social risk taking

Friedl A, Pondorfer A, Schmidt U (2019)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2019

Journal

Journal of Economic Psychology Elsevier

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2019.06.005

Abstract

Women in Western societies are typically more risk averse than men in individual risk taking decisions. In real life, however, risk taking decisions are usually made in a social context. So far, empirical evidence whether gender differences are also present in the social risk taking domain is missing. We use a controlled experiment to analyze gender differences in social risk taking. We find that inequality aversion is the main driver for risk aversion in social risk taking. Disaggregating the data for males and females shows that this effect is mainly driven by strong inequality aversion of women. Moreover, by running the experiment with non-standard subjects from an egalitarian small-scale society, our results suggest that gender differences in social risk taking are culture-specific.

Authors with CRIS profile

Andreas Friedl Lehrstuhl für Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Wirtschaftstheorie

Involved external institutions

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn DE Germany (DE) Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Friedl, A., Pondorfer, A., & Schmidt, U. (2019). Gender differences in social risk taking. Journal of Economic Psychology. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2019.06.005

MLA:

Friedl, Andreas, Andreas Pondorfer, and Ulrich Schmidt. "Gender differences in social risk taking." Journal of Economic Psychology (2019).

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