Cross‐Cultural Differences in Risk Perception: A Model‐Based Approach

The present study assessed cross‐cultural differences in the perception of financial risks. Students at large universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and the U.S., as well as a group of Taiwanese security analysts rated the riskiness of a set of monetary lotteries. Risk judgments differed with nationality, but not with occupation (students vs. security analysts) and were modeled by the Conjoint Expected Risk (CER) model.(1) Consistent with cultural differences in country uncertainty avoidance,(2) CER model parameters of respondents from the two Western countries differed from those of respondents from the two countries with Chinese cultural roots: The risk judgments of respondents from Hong Kong and Taiwan were more sensitive to the magnitude of potential losses and less mitigated by the probability of positive outcomes.

[1]  H. Levy,et al.  Approximating Expected Utility by a Function of Mean and Variance , 1979 .

[2]  R. Duncan Luce,et al.  Several possible measures of risk , 1980 .

[3]  Baruch Fischhoff,et al.  Judgment under uncertainty: Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk , 1982 .

[4]  A. Tversky,et al.  Representations of perceptions of risks , 1984 .

[5]  Elke U. Weber,et al.  Combine and conquer: A joint application of conjoint and functional approaches to the problem of risk measurement , 1984 .

[6]  Elke U. Weber,et al.  An axiomatic theory of conjoint expected risk , 1986 .

[7]  L. Robin Keller,et al.  Empirical investigation of some properties of the perceived riskiness of gambles , 1986 .

[8]  Richard W. Brislin,et al.  A culture general assimilator: Preparation for various types of sojourns , 1986 .

[9]  R. Brislin.  The wording and translation of research instruments. , 1986 .

[10]  J. March,et al.  Managerial perspectives on risk and risk taking , 1987 .

[11]  P. Slovic.  Perception of risk. , 1987, Science.

[12]  Elke U. Weber,et al.  A descriptive measure of risk , 1988 .

[13]  David L. Ronis,et al.  Probability judgment accuracy: China, Japan, and the United States , 1989 .

[14]  F. Fagnani,et al.  Risk Perception and Social Acceptability of Technologies: The French Case , 1989 .

[15]  C F Keown,et al.  Risk perceptions of Hong Kongese vs. Americans. , 1989, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[16]  William P. Bottom,et al.  Axiomatic measures of perceived risk: Some tests and extensions , 1989 .

[17]  William P. Bottom,et al.  An Empirical Evaluation of the Transitivity, Monotonicity, Accounting, and Conjoint Axioms for Perceived Risk , 1990 .

[18]  H. Markus,et al.  Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. , 1991 .

[19]  Robin Gregory,et al.  A Framework for Structuring Cross-Cultural Research in Risk and Decision Making , 1991 .

[20]  Eugene A. Rosa,et al.  Cognitive Representation of Risk Perceptions , 1991 .

[21]  Rakesh K. Sarin,et al.  Risk-value models , 1993 .

[22]  E U Weber,et al.  Dimensions of risk perception for financial and health risks. , 1993, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[23]  D. E. Bell.  Risk, return, and utility , 1995 .

[24]  James S. Dyer,et al.  A standard measure of risk and risk-value models , 1996 .

[25]  C. Palmer,et al.  Risk perception: an empirical study of the relationship between worldview and the risk construct. , 1996, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[26]  J. Yates,et al.  Beliefs about Overconfidence, Including Its Cross-National Variation , 1996 .

[27]  Hermann Jahnke,et al.  Remarks on: "Some Extensions of the Discrete Lotsizing and Scheduling Problem" , 1997 .

[28]  Christopher K. Hsee,et al.  Cross-Cultural Differences in Risk Perception,But Cross-Cultural Similarities in Attitudes Towards Perceived Risk , 1998 .