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RESEARCH SEMINAR

Paolo Crosetto: METARET- a meta-analysis of risk elicitation tasks

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Welcome to seminar with researcher Paolo Crosetto, Grenoble Applied Economics Lab.

Title: METARET- a meta-analysis of risk elicitation tasks

Abstract: 
Increasing experimental evidence points to the fact that the behavioral measures we use to elicit risk attitudes fail us. Risk elicitation tasks (RETs), at least in the way they are typically implemented in behavioral economics and psychology, 
1. correlate poorly with self-reported risk attitudes, real-world risk behaviors, and among themselves;
2. introduce distinct measurement errors and behavioral biases, and 
3. are not robust to sit-resit exercises. 

Why do RETs show poor correlation with self-reported measures, real-world risk behavior, and one another? In psychometrics terms, why do they show so little predictive validity? Despite the large number of studies comparing risk elicitation procedures, the extent to which current RETs are able to capture self-reported or out-of-the-lab behavior is still partly unknown. Since each study can cover only a limited subset of tasks and self-reported or real-world behaviors, the map of the cross-correlations across tasks and behavior is far from being complete.

Luckily, the data to create such a map already exists. Experimental economists have been routinely eliciting risk attitudes for over three decades. In this talk I will present the early results of a comprehensive meta-analysis of the internal and external validity of RETs, as well as promising new paths opened by recent research. 

The ongoing effort, code and presentations can be found at
https://github.com/paolocrosetto/METARET and all data can be explored interactively at
https://paolocrosetto.shinyapps.io/METARET/.