City Research Online

Abstract

We quantify differences in attitudes to loss from individuals with different demographic, personal and socio-economic characteristics. Our data are based on responses from an online survey of a representative sample of over 4,000 UK residents and allow us to produce the most comprehensive analysis of the heterogeneity of loss aversion measures to date. Using the canonical model proposed by Tversky and Kahneman (1992), we show that responses for the population as a whole differ substantially from those typically provided by students (who form the basis of many existing studies of loss aversion). The average aversion to a loss of £500 relative to a gain of the same amount is 2.41, but loss aversion correlates significantly with characteristics such as gender, age, education, financial knowledge, social class, employment status, management responsibility, income, savings and home ownership. Other related factors include marital status, number of children, ease of savings, rainy day fund, personality type, emotional state, newspaper and political party. However, once we condition on all the profiling characteristics of the respondents, some factors, in particular gender, cease to be significant, suggesting that gender differences in risk and loss attitudes might be due to other factors, such as income differences.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Loss aversion, expected utility, risk attitudes, gender effects, survey data
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD61 Risk Management H Social Sciences > HF Commerce H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Actuarial Science & Insurance Bayes Business School > Finance

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