Prof. Jörg Rieskamp, July 7th, 2026
Title: Risk tolerance, risk taking, and investment behavior.
People make consequential decisions under risk, such as choosing between different investments, medical treatments, or transportation options. According to traditional economic theories of decision-making, such as expected utility theory, people are assumed to form independent subjective evaluations of each choice option. However, numerous violations of this assumption of independent evaluation have been documented (e.g., Rieskamp, Mellers, & Busemeyer, 2006). This talk presents research on how people's risk tolerance can be measured most effectively and how people make decisions under risk. It demonstrates that the cognitive processes underlying violations of independent evaluation can be explained by a comparison process, in which people do not evaluate options in isolation but instead compare their attributes with one another in a noisy and imperfect manner. Finally, the talk shows that individual differences in risk tolerance have important implications for investment behavior and influence how people allocate their investment portfolios.
Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87259542392