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Abstract
Field experiment and household survey data are combined to investigate whether working
in a risky occupation such as fishing makes fishermen have different risk preferences
than individuals in other occupations. Prospect theory is utilized as the main analytical
framework and a structural model approach is developed to simultaneously correlate the
parameters of the utility function under prospect theory with other socioeconomic variables.
The key finding is that working in fishing makes economic agents less risk averse
than others. Fishermen also tend to be less sensitive to probability weighting changes in
the experiment. It is possible that fishermen have adapted to their unique environment by using specific heuristics for decision making under conditions of uncertainty.