Violence and Risk Preference: Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan: Comment

Abstract

In this comment on Callen et al. (2014), I revisit recent evidence uncovering a “preference for certainty” in violation of dominant normative and descriptive theories of decision-making under risk. I show that the empirical findings are potentially confounded by systematic noise. I then develop choice lists that allow me to disentangle these different explanations. Experimental results obtained with these lists reject explanations based on a preference for certainty in favor of explanations based on random choice. From a theoretical point of view, the levels of risk aversion detected in the choice list involving certainty can be accounted for by prospect theory through reference dependence activated by salient outcomes. (JEL C91, D12, D74, D81, O12, O17)