Are Risk Preferences Stable across Contexts? Evidence from Insurance Data

Barseghyan, Levon; Prince, Jeffrey; Teitelbaum, Joshua C.

doi:10.1257/aer.101.2.591

This setting lets you change the way you view articles. You can choose to have articles open in a dialog window, a new tab, or directly in the same window.

Open in Dialog
Open in New Tab
Open in same window

American Economic Review: Vol. 101 No. 2 (April 2011)

AER Volume. 101, Issue 2 | left

Previous Article Next Article right

Expand

Quick Tools:

Print Article Summary Email Link to this Article Export Citation
Sign up for Email Alerts Follow us on Twitter

Explore:

AER - All Issues

AER Forthcoming Articles

Are Risk Preferences Stable across Contexts? Evidence from Insurance Data

Article Citation

Barseghyan, Levon, Jeffrey Prince, and Joshua C. Teitelbaum. 2011. "Are Risk Preferences Stable across Contexts? Evidence from Insurance Data." American Economic Review, 101(2): 591-631.

DOI: 10.1257/aer.101.2.591

Abstract

Using a unique dataset, we test whether households' deductible choices in auto and home insurance reflect stable risk preferences. Our test relies on a structural model that assumes households are objective expected utility maximizers and claims are generated by household-coverage specific Poisson processes. We find that the hypothesis of stable risk preferences is rejected by the data. Our analysis suggests that many households exhibit greater risk aversion in their home deductible choices than their auto deductible choices. Our results are robust to several alternative modeling assumptions. (JEL D11, D83)

Article Full-Text Access

Full-text Article

Additional Materials

Download Data Set (88.86 KB) | Online Appendix (41.23 KB)

Authors

Barseghyan, Levon (Cornell U)
Prince, Jeffrey (IN U)
Teitelbaum, Joshua C. (Georgetown U Law Center)

JEL Classifications

D11: Consumer Economics: Theory
D83: Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief