Safe options and gender differences in risk attitudes

Gender differences in risk attitudes have recently been shown to be context-dependent rather than ubiquitous. We manipulate three widely used risk elicitation tasks to test whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives can explain the heterogeneity of the findings. We find that the availability of a safe option induces significant effects in two out of three tasks. Despite the well-known instability of elicited risk preferences, we show with a structural model that the effect on risk attitudes is rather stable across tasks, but not sufficiently strong to reach traditional significance levels.