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literature and conventional wisdom have led researchers to believe that boredom
increases economic risk taking, but the evidence in support of this conclusion
is limited and has important shortcomings. In four experiments (including more
than 1,300 subjects), we systematically studied the effects of boredom on
economic risk preferences. Across different risk elicitation tasks, boredom
inductions, incentive schemes, subject pools, and using both reduced form and
structural analyses, we consistently failed to find an effect of boredom on
risky decisions. Our results disprove that boredom leads to even small
increments in risk taking in one-shot elicitation tasks, and small to medium
increases in multiple-choice elicitations. These findings question an important
established belief, contribute to better understand the consequences of
boredom, and have substantive implications for experiments on economic decision
making.
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