Stimuli and procedure
Participants received a questionnaire describing 8 risky prospects, presented as investment opportunities (see Ta- ble 1). The prospects involved two positive outcomes and one negative outcome, all with equal probabilities (1/3), and were designed to have a correlation of about zero between their risk (the size of the negative outcome) and expected return. The instructions to the participants were as follows: “Assume that you are an investor facing 8 pos- sible investment possibilities. Each of these investments involves two gains and one loss. The loss stems from ex- penses associated with the investment, and the gains are net gains. Your task is to evaluate each of the investments on 6 scales. Before making your evaluations, please re- view all investments so you will be able to assess their relative value.”