Certainty Preference, Random Choice, and Loss Aversion: A Comment on "Violence and Risk Preference: Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan"

I revisit recent evidence uncovering a preference for certainty in violation of dominant normative and descriptive theories of decision making under risk. I explore two alternative explanations of the preference patterns found: i) systematic noise; and ii) reference dependence activated by salient outcomes. I develop choice lists that allow to disentangle these different explanations, and test them on rural subjects in southern India. The results reject explanations based on a preference for certainty in favor of explanations based on random choice. The estimates are further distorted by response mode effects, with loss aversion leading to an over-estimation of risk aversion.