Internal and external validity: Comparing two simple risk elicitation tasks

摘要

Researchers often need to elicit risk attitudes in field experiments or in laboratory experiments. However, choosing a risk elicitation task can be a source of concern, as risk attitudes have been often shown to vary dramatically across tasks. Using a large sample of approximately 2,000 subjects in a within-subjects design, we compare behavior in two commonly used incentivized risk elicitation tasks - the investment game and the ordered lottery choice game - recognized for their simplicity and ease of implementation. We find that risk attitudes elicited from the two tasks show considerable internal consistency, and importantly, have similar predictive validity for behavior in a different task with built-in uncertainty. We also explore determinants of inconsistency between the two risk tasks.