Holt Laury as a gumball machine

Abstract

The Holt and Laury (2002) task is arguably the most widely employed method for eliciting individual risk attitudes in economics. However, although around 15% of standard experimental subjects fail to complete the task consistently, this fraction increases to an alarming 60-70% in the case of children, teenagers, and other non-standard subject pools. This paper proposes a visual version of the Holt and Laury task, where subjects choose six times between two gumball machines. Using a sample of 4,687 adolescents, we show that the Gumball Machine task increases consistent behavior substantially till 80%.