With the rise of experimental research in the social sciences, numerous methods to elicit and classify people’s risk attitudes in the laboratory have evolved. However, evidence suggests that attitudes towards risk may vary considerably when measured with different methods. Based on a within-subject experimental design using four widespread risk preference elicitation tasks, we find that the different methods indeed give rise to considerably varying estimates of individual and aggregate level risk preferences. Conducting simulation exercises to obtain benchmarks for subjects’ behavior, we find that the observed heterogeneity in risk preference estimates across methods is qualitatively similar to the heterogeneity arising from independent random draws from the choice distributions observed in the experiment. Our study, however, provides evidence that subjects are surprisingly well aware of the variation in the riskiness of their choices. We argue that this calls into question the common interpretation of variation in revealed risk preferences as being inconsistent.

随着社会科学实验研究的兴起，在实验室中引发和分类人们风险态度的方法已经发展了许多。然而，有证据表明，当用不同的方法衡量时，对风险的态度可能会有很大差异。基于使用四种广泛的风险偏好引发任务的受试者内实验设计，我们发现不同的方法确实会导致对个体和总体风险偏好的估计差异很大。进行模拟练习以获得受试者行为的基准，我们发现在不同方法的风险偏好估计中观察到的异质性与从实验中观察到的选择分布的独立随机抽取产生的异质性在性质上相似。然而，我们的研究 提供的证据表明受试者非常清楚他们选择的风险变化。我们认为，这使人们对揭示的风险偏好差异的普遍解释产生了质疑，即不一致。