Strategies of Information Acquisition Under Uncertainty.

Summary The purpose of this thesis is to present four essays in behavioral and experimental economics on decision making under risk and ambiguity. The first essay provides a synthesis and perspective on the representativeness of experimental results on preferences: social preferences and preferences regarding risk and time in developed and developing countries. The second essay experimentally explores the effect of risk and ambiguity on infinite horizon job search behavior. The results show that under risk and ambiguity, reservation wages are lower than theoretical values and decrease during the search process. Similarly, subjects behave as ambiguity neutral agents. The third and fourth trials investigate the effect of social context and the correlation of payments on attitudes toward risk and ambiguity in the gain, loss, and mixed domains, respectively. The results show that the introduction of social context has a significant effect on risk attitudes in all three domains. Nevertheless, risk correlation has an effect on risk attitudes only in the mixed domain. Attitudes toward ambiguity vary by domain. Similarly, correlation of payments decreases ambiguity aversion.