Dealing with risk: Gender, stakes, and probability effects

This paper investigates how subjects deal with financial risk, both "upside" (with a small chance of a high payoff) and "downside" (with a small chance of a low payoff). We find that the same people who avoid risk in the downside setting tend to make more risky choices in the upside one. The experiment is designed to disentangle the probability-weighting and utility-curvature components of risk attitudes, and to differentiate settings in which gender differences arise from those in which they do not. Women are more risk averse for downside risks, but gender differences are diminished for upside risks.