| Abstract |
The Holt and Laury [1] 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 explores extensively a visual version of the Holt and Laury task, where subjects choose six times between two gumball machines. Using a sample of 4,972 adolescents, we find that the Gumball Machine task decreases the presence of inconsistencies substantially to 20%. Cognitive skills appear to be a strong predictor of consistency and risk preferences, but gender differences are not found. © 2025 Vasco, Francisco. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
