Aggregating individual risk aversion for the study of complex and risky group decision making

Abstract

This paper focuses on decision making under risk, comparing individual and risk preferences based on an experiment that consist on a lottery choice (individual) and a business game simulator (group) taking into account gender variable. Our main findings are in the one hand, that the theory generally accepted about than women are more risk averse than men, in this research, only it is true in individual decision making. On the other hand, we have obtained that the level of the risk of the strategies adopted by groups decreases in time; particularly, groups with majority of men reduced it relatively more. Moreover, we have found a positive correlation between the level of risk of the strategies and groups accumulated profits. Finally our results reveal that, toward losses, groups with majority of women become relatively more risk prone than groups with majority of men.