IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/col/000089/006712.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

It´s Not My Money: An Experiment on Risk Aversion and the House-money Effect

Author

Listed:
  • Luis Roberto Martínez
  • Christian Jaramillo
  • Nicolas De Roux
  • Juan-Camilo Cárdenas

Abstract

The house-money effect -people´s tendency to be more daring with easily-gotten money- is abehavioral pattern that poses questions about the external validity of experiments in economics: to what extent do people behave in experiments like they would have in a real-life situation, given that they play with easily-gotten house money? We ran an economic experiment with 66 students to measure the house-money effect on their risk preferences. They received an amount of money with which they made risky decisions involving losses and gains; a treatment group got the money 21 days in advance and a control group got it the day of the experiment. We find that, when facing possible losses, people in the treatment group showed a lower tolerance to risk than people in the control group. If the players are assumed to have a CRRA utility function and to behave according to expected-utility theory, the risk-attitude adjustment corresponds to an average increase of 1 in their risk aversion coefficient. While the exact pattern of this house-money adjustment differs by gender, it is not possible to determine the sign of this gender effect unambiguously. In any case, it is advisable to include credible controls for the house-money effect in experimental work in economics.

Suggested Citation

  • Luis Roberto Martínez & Christian Jaramillo & Nicolas De Roux & Juan-Camilo Cárdenas, 2010. "It´s Not My Money: An Experiment on Risk Aversion and the House-money Effect," Documentos CEDE 6712, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
  • Handle: RePEc:col:000089:006712
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8148/dcede2010-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lucy Ackert & Narat Charupat & Bryan Church & Richard Deaves, 2006. "An experimental examination of the house money effect in a multi-period setting," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 9(1), pages 5-16, April.
    2. Juan Camilo Cárdenas & Jeffrey Carpenter, 2010. "Risk Attitudes and Well-being in Latin America," Documentos CEDE 7718, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    3. Abigail Barr & Garance Genicot, 2008. "Risk Sharing, Commitment, and Information: An Experimental Analysis," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(6), pages 1151-1185, December.
    4. Hans P. Binswanger, 1980. "Attitudes Toward Risk: Experimental Measurement in Rural India," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 62(3), pages 395-407.
    5. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    6. Bosch-Domènech, Antoni & Silvestre, Joaquim, 2010. "Averting risk in the face of large losses: Bernoulli vs. Tversky and Kahneman," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 180-182, May.
    7. Keasey, Kevin & Moon, Philip, 1996. "Gambling with the house money in capital expenditure decisions: An experimental analysis," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 105-110, January.
    8. Jeremy Clark, 2002. "House Money Effects in Public Good Experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 5(3), pages 223-231, December.
    9. Richard H. Thaler & Eric J. Johnson, 1990. "Gambling with the House Money and Trying to Break Even: The Effects of Prior Outcomes on Risky Choice," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 36(6), pages 643-660, June.
    10. Guala,Francesco, 2005. "The Methodology of Experimental Economics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521618618.
    11. Keeler, James P & James, William L & Abdel-Ghany, Mohamed, 1985. "The Relative Size of Windfall Income and the Permanent Income Hypothesis," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 3(3), pages 209-215, June.
    12. Steven D. Levitt & John A. List, 2007. "What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 21(2), pages 153-174, Spring.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Alfredo Revollo-Fernandez & Alonso Aguilar-Ibarra, 2014. "Measures of risk associated to regulations compliance: a laboratory experiment on the use of common-pool resources," Journal of Risk Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(7), pages 903-921, August.
    2. Daniel Houser & Erte Xiao, 2015. "House money effects on trust and reciprocity," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 163(1), pages 187-199, April.
    3. Danková, Katarína & Servátka, Maroš, 2015. "The house money effect and negative reciprocity," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 60-71.
    4. Christoph Bühren & Thorben C. Kundt, 2013. "Worker or Shirker – Who Evades More Taxes? A Real Effort Experiment," MAGKS Papers on Economics 201326, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).
    5. Brice Corgnet & Roberto Hernán González & Praveen Kujal & David Porter, 2013. "The Effect of Earned vs. House Money on Price Bubble Formation in Experimental Asset Markets," Working Papers 13-04, Chapman University, Economic Science Institute.
    6. Yu Yvette Zhang & Rodolfo M Nayga Jr. & Dinah Pura T Depositario, 2019. "Learning and the possibility of losing own money reduce overbidding: Delayed payment in experimental auctions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(5), pages 1-19, May.
    7. Mickael Beaud & Marc Willinger, 2015. "Are People Risk Vulnerable?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(3), pages 624-636, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Juan Cárdenas & Nicolas Roux & Christian Jaramillo & Luis Martinez, 2014. "Is it my money or not? An experiment on risk aversion and the house-money effect," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 17(1), pages 47-60, March.
    2. Bosch-Domènech, Antoni & Silvestre, Joaquim, 2010. "Averting risk in the face of large losses: Bernoulli vs. Tversky and Kahneman," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 180-182, May.
    3. Nathalie Etchart-Vincent & Olivier l’Haridon, 2011. "Monetary incentives in the loss domain and behavior toward risk: An experimental comparison of three reward schemes including real losses," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 42(1), pages 61-83, February.
    4. Maximilian Rüdisser & Raphael Flepp & Egon Franck, 2017. "Do casinos pay their customers to become risk-averse? Revising the house money effect in a field experiment," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 20(3), pages 736-754, September.
    5. Daniel Houser & Erte Xiao, 2015. "House money effects on trust and reciprocity," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 163(1), pages 187-199, April.
    6. Hsu, Yuan-Lin & Chow, Edward H., 2013. "The house money effect on investment risk taking: Evidence from Taiwan," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 1102-1115.
    7. Hauke Jelschen & Ulrich Schmidt, 2023. "Windfall gains and house money: The effects of endowment history and prior outcomes on risky decision–making," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 66(3), pages 215-232, June.
    8. Maximilian Rüdisser & Raphael Flepp & Egon Franck, 2017. "When do reference points update? A field analysis of the effect of prior gains and losses on risk-taking over time," Working Papers 369, University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).
    9. Astrid Dannenberg & Thomas Riechmann & Bodo Sturm & Carsten Vogt, 2012. "Inequality aversion and the house money effect," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 15(3), pages 460-484, September.
    10. Dannenberg, Astrid & Riechmann, Thomas & Sturm, Bodo & Vogt, Carsten, 2010. "Stability and explanatory power of inequality aversion: an investigation of the house money effect," ZEW Discussion Papers 10-006, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    11. Darren Duxbury & Robert Hudson & Kevin Keasey & Zhishu Yang & Songyao Yao, 2013. "How prior realized outcomes affect portfolio decisions," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 41(4), pages 611-629, November.
    12. James C. Cox & Maroš Servátka & Radovan Vadovič, 2012. "Status Quo Effects in Fairness Games: Acts of Commission vs. Acts of Omission," Working Papers in Economics 12/01, University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance.
    13. Antoni Bosch-Domènech & Joaquim Silvestre, 2002. "Reflections on gains and losses: A 2x2x7 experiment," Economics Working Papers 640, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Feb 2005.
    14. Cherry, Todd L. & Kroll, Stephan & Shogren, Jason F., 2005. "The impact of endowment heterogeneity and origin on public good contributions: evidence from the lab," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 57(3), pages 357-365, July.
    15. Sour, Laura & Gutiérrez Andrade, Miguel Ángel, 2011. "Los incentivos extrínsecos y el cumplimiento fiscal [Extrinsic incentives and tax compliance]," MPRA Paper 66066, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. John A. Doukas & Wenjia Zhang, 2013. "Managerial gambling attitudes: evidence from bank acquisitions," Review of Behavioral Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 5(1), pages 4-34, September.
    17. Nicholas T. Bailey & Abhijit Ramalingam & Brock V. Stoddard, 2023. "Experimental (re-)analysis of the house-money effect in a public goods game," Journal of the Economic Science Association, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 9(1), pages 1-14, June.
    18. Uchida, Emi & Swallow, Stephen K. & Gold, Arthur J. & Opaluch, James & Kafle, Achyut & Merrill, Nathaniel H. & Michaud, Clayton & Gill, Carrie Anne, 2018. "Integrating Watershed Hydrology and Economics to Establish a Local Market for Water Quality Improvement: A Field Experiment," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 17-25.
    19. Stephan Kroll & Todd Cherry & Jason Shogren, 2007. "The impact of endowment heterogeneity and origin on contributions in best-shot public good games," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(4), pages 411-428, December.
    20. Moser, Riccarda & Raffaelli, Roberta & Notaro, Sandra, 2010. "The Role Of Production Methods In Fruit Purchasing Behaviour: Hypothetical Vs Actual Consumers’ Preferences And Stated Minimum Requirements," 115th Joint EAAE/AAEA Seminar, September 15-17, 2010, Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany 116426, European Association of Agricultural Economists.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    House-money effect; risk aversion; prospect theory; economic experiment; external validity.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:col:000089:006712. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Universidad De Los Andes-Cede (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ceandco.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.