Who would have thought this? But when it comes to financial uncertainty, men go out on a limb, according to newswise.com.
Now I'm not very responsible when it comes to money -- I spend what I don't have -- but apparently, a new study has found that "Men are more likely to interpret any information about an investment opportunity 'optimistically' and can more easily be persuaded into making risky financial decisions," suggests new research from the Rady School of Management at the University of California San Diego, according to newswise.com.
This is a little counter-intuitive but the study builds on existing research that shows women are more risk-averse than men. However, “risk” in previous research is most usually defined as situations in which people know the specific probabilities involved, like a 50% chance of winning a coin flip, the site reports.
“The uncertainty we encounter in everyday life rarely includes such precise odds – usually people have to make a decision with partial or incomplete information,” newswise quotes Uma Karmarkar, study author and assistant professor of marketing and innovation at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management and School of Global Policy and Strategy. “This research finds that men and women actually show very similar responses in low-information, uncertain financial decisions. However, it also shows a key difference: as information is added -- men tend to interpret it favorably, which in turn convinces them to increase the amount of money they’re willing to invest.”
Knew they had to get that in somewhere.
The experiments in the study were modeled after real-world investment decision-making, in which participants had to make spending choices using real money.
"Participants in the in-person experiments were asked to play games involving actual cash stakes," according to newswise. For each game, they were given a bag filled with 100 red and blue poker chips. Participants had to choose how much they were willing to pay – up to $10 for a 'ticket' to play a game where a single chip would be drawn from the bag.
However, if a red chip was drawn, they would win $20. If a blue chip was drawn, they’d win nothing. Players did not know how much of each color was in the bag. To make the game a little more challenging, in each game, they were given a little bit of information about the colors of some of the chips." Now, that can make anyone uncertain. And each player had the option not to bet at all and pocket the $10.
“The information we added was intentionally kept ambiguous,” Karmarkar said. “We would give them some good information, some bad information and we kept some information missing. For example, we would tell them that the bag has at least 17 red chips and at least 20 blue chips, so that information on the rest of the chips is still clearly missing, with participants having to ‘gamble’ on the probability that a red chip would be pulled from the bag.”
The results revealed that when there is little information overall, both men and women are wary about spending, but the more information you give men – good or bad – the more they pay compared to women. As the total amount of information increases, the gap in behavior continues to widen.
“Missing information clearly bothers women more than men in this experiment,” Karmarkar says. “As such, this research implies that men can be more easily persuaded to spend, but this is significantly related to the availability of relevant information about the situation.”
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