We obtain rich measures of the risk preferences of a sample of Vietnamese farmers, and revisit the link between risk preferences and economic well-being. Far from being particularly risk averse, our farmers are on average risk neutral and, thus, more risk tolerant than typical Western subject populations. This generalises recent findings indicating that students in poorer countries are more risk tolerant than students in richer countries to a general population sample. Risk aversion is, furthermore, negatively correlated with income within our (...) sample, but does not correlate with wealth. This also casts doubt on high levels of risk aversion causing failure to adopt new technologies, which we discuss. (shrink)

Cultural comparisons enjoy increasing popularity in economics. Since cultural comparison must abandon random allocation to treatments, it is unclear whether differences found between countries can be attributed to country characteristics or are merely driven by differences in subject pools. In experiments in two Chinese cities and at two campuses in Ethiopia, we show that within-country differences are negligible. Differences between the two countries, on the other hand, are large.

We investigate risk and ambiguity attitudes among Ethiopian farmers in one of the poorest regions of the world. Strong risk aversion and ambiguity aversion were found with the Ethiopian farmers. We compared their attitudes to those of a Western university student sample elicited by the same decision task. Ambiguity aversion was similar for farmers and students, but farmers were more risk averse. Our results show that ambiguity aversion is not restricted to Western student populations, and that studies of agricultural decisions (...) may benefit from explicitly considering ambiguity attitudes. (shrink)

This paper experimentally investigates the altruistic behavior of physicians and whether this behavior is affected by payment system and uncertainty in health outcome. Subjects in the experiment take on the role of physicians and decide on the provision of medical care for different types of patients, who are identical in all respects other than the degree to which a given level of medical treatment affects their health. We investigate physician altruism from the perspective of ethical principles, by categorizing physicians according (...) to how well their treatment decisions align with different principles for priority setting. The experiment shows that many physicians are altruistic toward their patients but also that the degree of altruism varies across patients with different medical needs. We find a strong effect of payment system that is overall unaffected by the introduction of risk and ambiguity in patients health outcomes. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity across individuals, in particular under the capitation payment system where physicians responses to the introduction of uncertainty in patient health are modulated by their own generic risk and ambiguity preferences. (shrink)