An experimental investigation of imprecision attitude and its relation with risk attitude and impatience

We report in this article the result of three experiments on risk, ambiguity, and time attitude. The first two differed by the population considered (students vs. general population) while the third one used a different protocol and concerned students and portfolio managers. We find quite a lot of heterogeneity at the individual level. Of principal interest was the elicitation of risk, time, and ambiguity attitudes and the relationship among these (model free) measures. We find that on the student population, there is essentially no correlation. A non-negligible fraction of the population behaves in an extremely cautious manner in the risk and ambiguity domain. When we drop this population from the sample, the correlation between our measures is also non-significant. We also raise three questions linked to measurement of ambiguity attitudes that come out from our data sets.     

Delayed probabilistic risk attitude: a parametric approach

Theory and Decision - Experimental studies suggest that individuals exhibit more risk aversion in choices among prospects when the payment and resolution of uncertainty are immediate relative to...     

The impact of risk attitude,uncertainty and disequilibria on optimal production and inventory

Summary The empirical facts seem to indicate that in real economies the effect of uncertainty tends to decrease production. The limitations of empirical investigations presented should be stressed: they were performed mainly on an aggregate level, they mainly refer to Austrian manufacturing, they rely heavily on questionnaires. Above all empirical investigation will never be able to decide normative questions or to explain the behavior in the general equilibrium. Nevertheless in the short run, given all the rigidities and disequilibria which exist, uncertainty tends to lower optimal production even in absence of risk aversion. Risk aversion becomes important for large, for once-for-all decisions, but it is not the only channel through which uncertainty changes decisions.Technological concavity created by concave marginal revenues or by convex marginal costs, marginal costs of uncertainty in disequilibria model or asymmetric costs of revisions of the preliminary decision are able to bias the decision downward in a real world economy without invokingPaper presented to the 2nd Conference on the Foundations of Risk and Utility (FUR), Venezia, 1984.     

母亲教育水平、婚姻教育匹配与子女非认知能力

基于中国教育追踪调查2014-2015年数据,揭示了父母教育期望对个体非认知能力的作用机制,即不同婚配模式中父母通过提高教育期望,强化婚配效应对子女非认知能力的影响.研究发现:父母教育同质婚对子女非认知能力的发展有积极影响.母亲教育水平与子女自我效能感、 社会行为和交往能力呈现积极的相关性,并且作用高于父亲.高教育同质婚的"协同促进"对子女发展的边际效应最大.教育婚配对子女影响效应具有城乡与性别差异,农村受教育程度较高的母亲无法弥补城乡教育发展差异对子女非认知能力的负面影响,农村父亲的教育水平对子女非认知能的影响大于母亲.从子女性别来看,母亲教育水平越高对男孩社会行为能力和交往能力的积极影响越大.     

Impression management pressures on racial attitude surveys

For decades, researchers have expressed concern that self-report racial attitude measures are vulnerable to distortion from pressures respondents feel to present themselves as unprejudiced. A common response to this problem is to measure social desirability separately from racial attitudes and control for its variance in statistical analyses. The present study is designed to test whether such controls are sufficient. Participants rated items from both racial attitude and social desirability scales in terms of the amount of pressure they would feel to respond in a particular way regardless of their true attitudes. Participants report significantly greater response pressure on racial attitude items than on social desirability items, and ratings on the two types of items have only moderately shared variance. Implications for controlling social desirability in racial attitude research are discussed.     

品质生活·珠宝态度

品质,是一种态度。尚品,未必奢华。女人对珠宝的倾心是与生俱来的,二者的合壁也是浑然天成的,倾尽一生的时间,竭尽所能,不遗余力地收藏珠宝,几乎是所有女性不二的心愿。钻石华贵气派,猫眼精灵巧妙,翡翠凝练典雅……提起珠宝,人们的脑海中就会浮现出光芒四射、高贵雅致之类的词汇。然而,我们所追求的品质生活,并不是盲目飚高价格,不是无休止地追逐奢华,品质生活,要的是一种态度。珠宝加身,无论贵贱,都是审美品鉴的一种兑现。彩钻、银饰、珠串、墨翠,价格高低不等,个性魅力各具特色,若佩戴得当,立刻令你加分不少。     

基于网络的安全风险分析

在现代社会生活中，网络为人们提供了各种信息交流的平台。由于运用网络进行沟通时存在交互性和操作的独立性特征，所以网络的运行存在风险。本文分析了形成网络安全的风险问题的种种因素，并提出了化解网络风险的对策。     

Empathy and professional attitude in social workers and non-trained aides

The purpose of this study was to investigate empathic communication and professional attitude in vocational groups representing different levels of professional training. A further aim was to elucidate some aspects of the impact of the clients. Four groups of professionals participated, three with degrees as social workers and one with only short professional training. Three groups worked with committed drug addicts, one group with somatically ill patients. The 110 subjects were tested with a video-test of professional attitude and empathic communication. Different response patterns were found in the different groups. The group with short training had the highest proportion of unprofessional responses. The group of social workers working with somatically ill patients showed the highest amount of empathic communication. Furthermore, there was a distinction among the kind of unprofessional responses used by the different groups. Hypotheses on the causes of these differences and implications for future research are discussed.     

Suspicious minds: local context and attitude variation across Swedish municipalities

Johansson Sevä I. Suspicious minds: local context and attitude variation across Swedish municipalities
Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 225–235 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article investigates whether degree of suspicion of welfare abuse relates to local context in Sweden. It is suggested that certain features of Swedish municipalities can create a local information bias influencing individual suspicion of welfare abuse. Prevalence of social problems and political climate are features of the municipal context having the potential to influence opinion formation. Social problems are captured by local unemployment, social assistance and ill‐health rates. Political climate is captured by electoral support for conservatives. The results indicate that local context can influence suspicion of welfare abuse, contexts where social problems are widespread reduce such suspicion. While local political climate seems important in itself, it also interacts with social problem level, increasing suspicion if a conservative political climate and social problems coexist. While social problems seem to generate less suspicion regarding social policy abuse, they also provide ‘raw material’ for political rhetoric regarding suspicion.     

Change of attitude toward culture: pre- and post-expatriation experiences of managers

Cultural adjustment and intercultural effectiveness strongly influence international managerial issues, such as organizational success in a local firm, assignment completion, cost of expatriation, and repatriation. Therefore, employees assigned to work in another country need to prepare by learning about that country’s culture before expatriation. Much research has been conducted in the last few decades on the role of culture in expatriation. This study examines how the attitude of expatriate managers toward the importance of culture changes between the pre- and post-expatriation periods. This study is structured as a two-step investigation: (1) pre-expatriation cultural preparation and (2) thoughts on the importance of culture after expatriation. The research sample was South Korean expatriate managers working in Turkey or the US. All participants were reached by the trace method, and the interview data were analyzed in QSR NVivo software with content analysis. The results showed that expatriate managers’ attitude toward the importance of culture changed as a result of expatriation. Pre-expatriation, some participants did not prepare for the new culture. However, after the expatriation experience, all agreed that an understanding of the host culture was important during the assignment. An overseas experience allowed participants to understand the significant role played by culture in their adjustment to the new environment.     

Risk communication and attitude change: Taiwan's national debate over nuclear power

This article reports the first analysis of the effects of a national risk-communication program that disseminated the facts about the risks associated with nuclear power plants. It relies upon a unique set of circumstances in Taiwan. The state-operated power corporation sponsored a national debate in an effort to promote greater public consensus on the need for a fourth nuclear power plant. This analysis uses statedrisk perceptions and attitudes toward the plant to evaluate the effect of the debate. The results are based on a panel of households interviewed before and after the debate. They suggest that the debate did not reduce respondents' perceived risks from nuclear power and had little perceptible effect on the attitude changes of our sample. The only systematic influences detected on the observed attitude changes imply that respondents reacted counter to the debate's objectives, and thus the debate seems likely to continue to erode support for the new plant.The authors are, respectively, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Economics, Academic Sinica; and University Distinguished Professor of Economics, North Carolina State University, and Resources for the Future University Fellow. Thanks are due Jin Long Liu for his excellent research assistance in developing these results, to Kip Viscusi for constructive comments, and to Barbara Scott for her helpful editing of earlier drafts of this article. Partial support for Smith's research was provided by National Science Foundation grant SES-8911372.     

Threshold effects of liquidity risk and credit risk on bank stability in the MENA region

This paper studies the relationships between both liquidity and credit risks on bank stability for a panel data set of 75 conventional banks belonging to 11 countries of the MENA region observed during the period 1999–2017. By performing a Panel Smooth Threshold Regression (PSTR) model developed by Gonzalez et al. (2005), estimation results show that the relationships between bank stability-credit risk and bank stability-liquidity risk are non-linear and characterized by the presence of two optimal thresholds which are equal to 13.16% for credit risk and 19.03% for liquidity risk. Contrary to their positive effects below these optimal thresholds, credit risk and liquidity risk become detrimental to bank stability in high regime.To ensure their stability, banks are encouraged to revise the primacy given to credit activity and diversify their activities to improve profitability. They are also recommended to strengthen their own funds and opt for appropriate restructuring to ease their small size. As for the States of the selected countries, they have to deeply reform their financial systems and develop the legal framework relating to new techniques of external management of banking risks including securitization and defeasance. Likewise, these states are fortified to ensure political stability, which is a key factor for banking and financial stability.     

Hope: An empirical study of attitude toward the timing of uncertainty resolution

Hope is experienced when there is enjoyment in delaying the resolution of uncertainty. The main objective of this article is to identify the phenomenon of hope. In addition, we empirically test several axiomatic theories of temporal preferences which have implications for attitudes toward the timing of uncertainty resolution. Overall, the data support the extension of recursive expected utility specification to incorporate a weighted utility model of attitude toward future uncertainty. We find that the instances where hopefulness are more prevalent tend to be associated with a small probability of occurrence of a large gain. Interestingly, the degree of hopefulness is not correlated with risk attitude.     

Living with a developmentally disabled child: attitude of family members in India

This study sought to create an in-depth understanding of the experiences of living with a family member suffering from developmental disabilities from the social as well as personal point of view through qualitative research. The study used phenomenological methodology. Sixteen participants were recruited through purposive and snowball method. Data were collected via an open-ended narrative inviting the informants to focus on the experiences of living with a family member suffering from the disorder and analyzed thematically. The issue of personal context emerged as a key theme in understanding perceptions of the respondents. Another important theme was that from the social context. This study explores the emotional sufferings faced by family members of the sufferer. It also provides insights into the Indian social culture and its impact on the family.     

The impact of risk sharing on efficient decision

A group of risk-averse members must choose among monetary risks and payoff-sharing rules. Departure from the status quo requires unanimous consent. Such groups drill for oil, bail out nations, and make hostile takeover bids. Assume agreement on probabilities. As is well known, if all members have identically shaped HARA utility functions, efficient group act-choices follow another such function independently of payoff sharing. We show that all other groups inevitably have complex efficient behavior, accepting gambles among individually unacceptable lotteries in almost every status quo position. We also develop proper risk aversion for groups, and treat disagreement on probabilities.Support of the Associates of the Harvard Business School (Pratt) and the Business and Government and Energy and Environmental Policy Centers (Zeckhauser) is gratefully acknowledged. We received helpful comments from Scott Johnson, Mark Machina, and a referee. Jay Patel provided assistance beyond the call of collegiality.     

The effect of information on health risk valuations

This article examines the effect of familiarity with chronic lung disease on people's willingness to pay to reduce their risk of contracting chronic bronchitis, and on their willingness to increase their risk of auto death to reduce chronic bronchitis risk. We find that persons who have a relative with chronic lung disease are willing to give up more income to reduce their risk of chronic bronchitis than persons with no first-hand knowledge of the disease; however, their willingness to increase their risk of auto death to reduce their risk of chronic bronchitis is no different, on average, than persons with no first-hand knowledge of lung disease. This suggests that responses to risk-risk tradeoffs may be more stable than responses to risk-income choices.This research was sponsored by Resources for the Future and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Policy Planning and Evaluation, Alan Carlin and Joel Scheraga, project officers. We thank Robert Mitchell for his help in conducting focus groups, and Caroline Harnett and Sari Radin for research assistance. Stan Presser, Sue Dowden, and Tim Triplett of the University of Maryland's Survey Research Center administered the survey. We especially thank Stan Presser for his suggestion that we sample relatives of people with chronic lung disease. We also thank Kip Viscusi, Wes Magat, and Joel Huber for making available their computer programs and data, and Ajay Kalra for programming help. Paul Portney and John Mullahy provided useful comments on an earlier draff of the article, as did two referees.     

The role of social desirability bias and racial/ethnic composition on the relation between education and attitude toward immigration restrictionism

Social scientists note individuals tend to respond favorably to sensitive topics in surveys, but few consider factors triggering these responses. This study uses unique data to examine respondents’ racial/ethnic attitude under direct and indirect modes of elicitation. In particular, the list experiment provides a cloak of anonymity to a random subsample of individuals that allows them to respond truthfully about their racial/ethnic attitudes. By comparing responses between administration modes, this study evaluates whether social desirability pressures mediate, and racial/ethnic composition moderate, the relation between education and racial/ethnic attitudes. Findings indicate an initial positive relation between education and racial/ethnic attitudes, but desirability bias mainly drives this relation. Furthermore, there is some support racial/ethnic composition moderates the influence of social desirability on education.     

Economic consequences of Nth-degree risk increases and Nth-degree risk attitudes

We study comparative statics of Nth-degree risk increases within a large class of problems that involve bidimensional payoffs and additive or multiplicative risks. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for unambiguous impact of Nth-degree risk increases on optimal decision making. We develop a simple and intuitive approach to interpret these conditions : novel notions of directional Nth-degree risk aversion that are characterized via preferences over lotteries.     

Global risk management

Industries that deal with hazardous systems are faced with the task of managing a spectrum of risks within resource contraints. They have essentially two options that can be combined in a global risk-management strategy: insurance (loss sharing) and risk mitigation through technical and organizational measures. In this article, global risk-management strategies based on probabilistic risk analysis and its extension to include management factors are described. Some issues and solutions are illustrated through practical examples, drawn mostly from the recent research of the Industrial Engineering Risk Research Group at Stanford (the tiles of the U.S. Space Shuttle, offshore platforms, marine pipelines, and anesthesia in modern hospitals).