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How nurture can shape preferences: an experimental study on risk preferences of Vietnamese fishers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2010

QUANG NGUYEN
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Abstract

We combined field experiment and household survey data to investigate whether working in a risky occupation such as fishing makes fishers less risk averse than people in other occupations. The unique characteristic of Vietnam's fisheries enables us to solve the endogeneity problem of occupational choice usually found in this kind of study. We used prospect theory as the main analytical framework and developed a practical procedure to simultaneously estimate the parameters of the utility function under prospect theory. The key finding is that working in a fishery makes economic agents less risk averse than others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 5 , October 2010 , pp. 609 - 631
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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