Considering the work of an internal auditor.
Risk is ubiquitous in decision-making. The extent to which people are willing to take on risk constitutes their risk preferences.
Assessing and measuring the risk preferences of individuals is critical for economic analysis and policy prescriptions.
Hallmark theories of risk and uncertainty such as subjective expected utility (Savage, 1954) and prospect theory (Kahneman
and Tversky, 1979) leave risk attitudes as a free parameter, and individuals may have differing attitudes toward risk.
For example, when given a chance to purchase a lottery ticket with equal chances of winning either $10 or $0, a riskneutral
individual will be willing to pay up to $5—the expected value of the lottery. Individuals who are only willing to pay
less than $5 are considered to be risk-averse, while those willing to pay more are considered to be risk-seeking. Any of these
risk attitudes is consistent with all theories, given some risk-attitude parameters.
Economists and psychologists have developed a variety of experimental methodologies to elicit and assess individual
risk attitudes. Choosing which to utilize, however, is largely dependent on the question one wants to answer, as well as the
characteristics of the sample population. The goal of this paper is to present a series of prevailing methods for eliciting risk
preferences and outline the advantages and disadvantages of each. We do not attempt to give a comprehensive account of all
the methods or nuances of measuring risk, but rather to outline some advantages and disadvantages of different methods.
For a more comprehensive discussion (with different conclusions), see for example Cox and Harrison (2008).
We characterize elicitation methods according to their complexity. More complex methods are typically used for estimating
parameters corresponding to risk preferences of a model that makes particular functional form assumptions. These
parameters canthenbe used as evidence for or against particular theories of decision-making. Complexmethods also demand