Measuring Beliefs and Ambiguity Attitudes Towards Discrete Sources of Uncertainty

This paper proposes a new method to measure beliefs and ambiguity attitudes towards events that are not necessarily equally likely and belong to a discrete set (i.e., discrete sources of uncertainty). Our method increases robustness to misspecification and allows flexibility in parametric choices compared to previous methods. We implement our method experimentally to both equal and different sources of uncertainty in two contexts: trust and coordination games. We find two main results. First, for equal sources of uncertainty, our method successfully reveals that subjects have context-independent beliefs on events, but context-dependent utility and weighting functions. This result indicates that comparing different sources of uncertainty requires a complete measurement of the utility and weighting functions. Second, different sources of uncertainty where the events are not equally likely lead to an increase in likelihood insensitivity, which indicates that the beliefs formation process of unknown events is cognitively demanding.