ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
The origin of risk aversion.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Judgment behaviors differentiate depression from anxiety.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Evolutionarily Optimal Risk Aversion.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2026Article
- Distinct patterns of social contagion under risk and ambiguity.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The evolution of discrimination under finite memory constraints.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Discrete, recurrent, and scalable patterns in non-operant judgement underlie affective picture ratings.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- Predicting COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake Using a Small and Interpretable Set of Judgment and Demographic Variables: Cross-Sectional Cognitive Science Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2024Article
- Sense of safety or meaning in danger? Real-contact stick fighting as an imagistic ritual.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- How growers make decisions impacts plant disease control.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Individual risk-aversion responses tune epidemics to critical transmissibility (Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Article
- Evolved attitudes to risk and the demand for equity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Accuracy-Risk Trade-Off Due to Social Learning in Crowd-Sourced Financial Predictions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- To maximize or randomize? An experimental study of probability matching in financial decision making.PloS one · 2021Article
- Age Influences Loss Aversion Through Effects on Posterior Cingulate Cortical Thickness.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- Article
- The Relationship Between Uncertainty and Affect.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Risky business: linkingProceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Reproductive suppression, birth defects, and periviable birth.Evolutionary applications · 2018Article
- Polya's bees: A model of decentralized decision-making.Science advances · 2015Article
- A marker of biological ageing predicts adult risk preference in European starlings,Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Risk aversion is one of the most basic assumptions of economic behavior, but few studies have addressed the question of where risk preferences come from and why they differ from one individual to the next. Here, we propose an evolutionary explanation for the origin of risk aversion. In the context of a simple binary-choice model, we show that risk aversion emerges by natural selection if reproductive risk is systematic (i.e., correlated across individuals in a given generation). In contrast, risk neutrality emerges if reproductive risk is idiosyncratic (i.e., uncorrelated across each given generation). More generally, our framework implies that the degree of risk aversion is determined by the stochastic nature of reproductive rates, and we show that different statistical properties lead to different utility functions. The simplicity and generality of our model suggest that these implications are primitive and cut across species, physiology, and genetic origins.
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