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This paper provides a systematic analysis of individual attitudes towards ambiguity, based on laboratory experiments. The design of the analysis allows to capture individual behavior across various levels of ambiguity, ranging from low to high. Attitudes towards risk and attitudes towards ambiguity are disentangled, providing pure measures of ambiguity aversion. Ambiguity aversion is captured in several ways, i.e. as a discount factor net of a risk premium, and as an estimated parameter in a generalized utility function. We find that ambiguity aversion varies across individuals, and with the level of ambiguity, being most prominent for intermediate levels. Around one third of subjects show no aversion, one third show maximum aversion, and one third show intermediate levels of ambiguity aversion, while there is almost no ambiguity seeking. While most theoretical work on ambiguity builds on maxmin expected utility, our results provide evidence that MEU does not adequately capture individual attitudes towards ambiguity for the majority of individuals. Instead, our results support models that allow for intermediate levels of ambiguity aversion. Moreover, we find risk aversion to be statistically unrelated to ambiguity aversion on average. Taken together, the results support the view that ambiguity is an important and distinct argument in decision making under uncertainty.
This paper sets up an experimental asset market in the laboratory to investigate the effects of ambiguity on price formation and trading behavior in financial markets. The obtained trading data is used to analyze the effect of ambiguity on various market outcomes (the price level, volatility, trading activity, market liquidity, and the degree of speculative trading) and to test the quality of popular empirical market-based measures for the degree of ambiguity. We find that ambiguity decreases market prices and trading activity; ambiguity leads to lower market liquidity through wider bid-ask spreads; and ambiguity leads to less speculative trading. We also find that popular market-based measures of ambiguity used in the empirical literature do not seem to correctly capture the true degree of ambiguity.