Recent experimental evidence suggests that noisy behavior correlates strongly with personal characteristics. Since decision noise leads to bias in most elicitation tasks, there is a risk of falsely interpreting noise-driven relationships as preference driven. This puts previous studies that found a negative relation between personality measures and risk aversion into perspective and in particular raises the question of how to achieve robust inference in this domain. This paper shows, by way of an economic experiment with subjects from all walks of life, that using structural estimation to model heterogeneity of noise in combination with a balanced design allows us to mitigate the bias problem. Our estimations show that cognitive ability is related to noisy behavior rather than risk preferences. We also find age and education to be strongly related to noise, but the personality characteristics obtained using the Big Five inventory are less related to noise and more robustly correlated to risk preferences.

最近的实验证据表明，嘈杂的行为与个人特征密切相关。由于决策噪声会导致大多数启发任务产生偏差，因此存在将噪声驱动的关系错误地解释为偏好驱动的风险。这使以前的研究发现了人格测度和风险规避之间的负相关关系，特别是提出了如何在该领域实现可靠推断的问题。通过对各行各业进行的经济实验，本文表明，结合平衡的设计，使用结构估计对噪声的异质性进行建模可以使我们减轻偏差问题。我们的估计表明，认知能力与嘈杂的行为有关，而不是与风险偏好有关。